Visions of Inequality
From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
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- € 30,99
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- € 30,99
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A Financial Times Best Book of the Year.
A sweeping and original history of how economists across two centuries have thought about inequality, told through portraits of six key figures.
“How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?” That is the question Branko Milanovic imagines posing to six of history’s most influential economists: François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Probing their works in the context of their lives, he charts the evolution of thinking about inequality, showing just how much views have varied among ages and societies. Indeed, Milanovic argues, we cannot speak of “inequality” as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place.
Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.
Meticulously extracting each author’s view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker’s outlook given what was knowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies.
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CUNY economist Milanovic (A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality) profiles prominent economists in this sweeping survey of more than 200 years of philosophical thought about inequality. He begins with the 18th-century French economist Francois Quesnay, who sought to prove that "the social structure of the ideal society" was a "rich, and perhaps stationary, agricultural kingdom." But this "static, one-shot picture of the class structure" failed to predict how classes would further stratify with industrial development. Adam Smith adopted a model in which economic development proceeded along increasingly complex stages, leading to the inevitable creation of inequality. David Ricardo, writing in late-18th-century England, "defined more sharply than anybody before him the three principal social classes" (landowners, renters, and capitalists). Karl Marx focused on how economic mechanisms, such as capitalism's system of value extraction through wage labor, generate the immiseration of the lower classes. Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto, a contemporary of Marx, was "a conservative with antireligious feelings" and, Milanovic contends, the first to speculate that income inequality varies over time as social institutions change. Though Milanovic peppers in amusing tidbits, from Pareto's dozens of cats to the likelihood that Ricardo was twice as rich as Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy, it's still a dense and scholarly account. This will appeal primarily to readers with a background in economic theory and analysis.
