A Brief History of Equality
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Public Books Best Book of the Year
“A profound and optimistic call to action and reflection. For Piketty, the arc of history is long, but it does bend toward equality. There is nothing automatic about it, however: as citizens, we must be ready to fight for it, and constantly (re)invent the myriad of institutions that will bring it about. This book is here to help.”
—Esther Duflo
“A sustained argument for why we should be optimistic about human progress…[Piketty] has laid out a plan that is smart, thoughtful, and motivated by admirable political convictions.”
—Gary Gerstle, Washington Post
“Thomas Piketty helped put inequality at the center of political debate. Now, he offers an ambitious program for addressing it…This is political economy on a grand scale, a starting point for debate about the future of progressive politics.”
—Michael J. Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit
“[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.”
—David Marchese, New York Times Magazine
It’s easy to be pessimistic these days. We know that inequality has increased dramatically over the past two generations. Its ravages are increasingly impossible to ignore. But the grand sweep of history gives us reasons for hope. In this short and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress, the world’s leading economist of inequality shows that over the centuries we have been moving, fitfully and inconsistently but inexorably, toward greater equality.
Thomas Piketty guides us through the seismic movements that have made the modern world: the birth of capitalism, the age of revolution, imperialism, slavery, two world wars, and the building of the welfare state. He shows that through it all, societies have moved toward a more just distribution of income and assets, reducing racial and gender inequalities and offering greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. To keep moving, he argues, we need to commit to legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality, while resisting the temptations of cultural separatism. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better. But do we dare?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"The advance toward equality is a battle that began long ago and needs only to be continued in the twenty-first century," according to this optimistic treatise from economist Piketty (Capital and Ideology). Contending that inequality is a human construct shaped by ideology, politics, and institutions and not a by-product of natural hierarchies, Piketty details how two world wars and the Great Depression produced a "Great Redistribution" of wealth through progressive taxation and the creation of the welfare state. Tax reforms in the 1980s sparked a rise in income inequality, but Piketty believes that a "decentralized, self-managing, democratic socialism based on the continual circulation of power and property" can reverse the trend and compete more effectively than traditional free-market capitalism against China, where the state controls 30% of public capital. He calls for "democratically neutral" university admissions criteria based on "students' wishes, their grades, and their social origins" and quotas for the advancement of women in government and business. Piketty also envisions "transnational assemblies" that would replace the UN and administer global labor laws and common taxes on income and inheritance. Marked by Piketty's trademark lucidity, impressive multidisciplinary scholarship, and provocative progressivism, this is a vital introduction to his ideas.