Thomas Piketty put inequality in the advanced market economies at the heart of political debate. The French economist’s 2013 bestseller Capital in the 21st Century used long runs of historical data on incomes and wealth to demonstrate how wide the gap between the rich and the rest has become. Thick with data and the famous “r>g” formula, its publication came after a decade or more of median incomes stagnating, validating righteous outrage about the chasms scarring early 21st-century society.
It was a rather gloomy book, arguing in effect that as “r” — the rate of return on capital — usually is greater than “g” — the growth rate of the economy and hence labour incomes, it takes a cataclysm to reduce inequality. War, destroying the value of the assets held by the rentier classes, is generally required.
That underlying pessimism is also present in this new book, A Brief History of Equality. “[T]he most fundamental transformations seen in the history of inegalitarian regimes involve social conflicts and large-scale political crises,” Piketty writes, referring to the French Revolution and the two world wars: the assets of the wealth are destroyed and, alongside this levelling down, crises generate a more egalitarian sentiment, at least for a while.