Brief History of Equality

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceA Public Books Best Book of the Year“An opportunity for readers to see Piketty bring his larger argument about the origins of inequality and his program for fighting it into high relief.”—Nicholas Lemann, New York TimesThe world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.It’s easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It’s a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.

There is no historian of global inequality more impactful today than Piketty. His latest book is a succinct synthesis of the important lessons of his work to date—a valuable resource for all of us trying to build an economy that is driven by value creation for all and not value extraction for the few., Thomas Piketty helped put inequality at the center of political debate. Now, he offers an ambitious program for addressing it. The revitalized democratic socialism he proposes goes beyond the welfare state by calling for guaranteed employment, inheritance for all, power-sharing in corporations, and new rules for globalization. This is political economy on a grand scale, a starting point for debate about the future of progressive politics., [Piketty] argues that we’re on a trajectory of greater, not less, equality and lays out his prescriptions for remedying our current corrosive wealth disparities., An opportunity for readers to see Piketty bring his larger argument about the origins of inequality and his program for fighting it into high relief., A sustained argument for why we should be optimistic about human progress…An engaged and clearheaded socialist thinker, Piketty sets forth…one of the most comprehensive and comprehensible social democratic programs available anywhere…He has laid out a plan that is smart, thoughtful, and motivated by admirable political convictions.

Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics and Codirector of the World Inequality Lab.

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