Brief and largely oriented towards the past, the latest book by Thomas Piketty 'A Brief History of Equality' has received its first non-French editions. There is no revolutionary new economic discovery here as in 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century', but readers can now see how Piketty has mastered his grand theme of the origins of inequality and how persuasive he is in his program to combat it.
The previous two books by Thomas Piketty, the first of which, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century', made him a superstar, contained about a thousand pages of text that did not particularly cater to economically less educated readers. Therefore, the author begins this new one with a sort of justification for simplification, citing a series of requests he received to 'write something short'. This time it is 'only' 250 pages.
However, his 'A Brief History of Equality' should not be underestimated as a consciously simplified commercial read. There is, admittedly, no revolutionary new economic discovery, like that in 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century', where Piketty shocked the world by pointing out that the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. But this time he does not write in the tone of a patient teacher.
Readers can now see how Piketty himself has mastered his grand theme of the origins of inequality and how persuasive he is in presenting his program to combat that inequality. And he is not unconvincing. The first incidental remark: yes, one can write about self-management without mentioning Yugoslavia even once (Piketty recognizes it in several economic models of other countries).
Yet Not Everything is Grim
Although much of today's discussion on inequality is focused on the period since 1980, when the benefits of growth were channeled into a narrow path towards a thin layer of the richest, Piketty repeats the optimistic story of the remarkable progress of the world towards equality.
A story we tend to forget. Therefore, his timeframe is much broader – it starts from 1780 and stops in 2020, and he firmly bases his optimism on statistics: life expectancy rose during this period from 26 to 72 years, and with the strengthening of compulsory state education, literacy rates increased from about 10 to 85 percent. Moreover, slavery and colonialism, which were once endemic, are now (mostly) abolished.
Today we can say that about half of the population of the developed world is at least middle class (although, Piketty warns, before the 20th century there was no middle class to speak of). The right to vote, which for centuries was even in democracies limited to male property owners (Piketty brings us a surprising, very restrictive, and by today's standards not at all democratic Swedish model from the early 20th century), is on its way to becoming universal.
Piketty does not doubt what has caused this progress. For him, it is the emergence of progressive income and wealth taxes and a comprehensive welfare state. Taxes are his obsession, which makes him hated by probably everyone except the most liberal wing of the left.
More precisely, the new American left, where his ideas have caught on with politicians like the popular but 'unelectable' socialist senator Bernie Sanders and his collaborator in two campaigns, the significantly younger and more modern congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and with modifications from the experienced senator Elisabeth Warren, whose last presidential campaign was probably not the last she will run.
Roots of Failure
The book presents a comparative history of inequality among social classes in human societies. Or as the author presents it, it offers a history of equality, 'because throughout history there has been a long-term movement towards social, economic, and political leveling'. The world of the early 2020s, as unjust as it may seem to us, is more egalitarian than the world of 1950 or 1900, which were themselves in many ways more egalitarian than those of 1850 or 1780.
—
—As in his previous book 'Capital and Ideology', Piketty concludes that the social democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for several generations after World War II has been dismantled, but not out of necessity, rather due to the rise of 'neoproprietarian' ideology, whose roots he sees in the collapse of the Soviet model of communism and the collapse of the communist bloc in the 1990s. Changes in Russia and China, where those closest to political power still benefit the most, are probably the best illustration of this.
Somewhat following the popular thesis of Francis Fukuyama about the 'end of history' at the turn of the millennium (Fukuyama later renounced the thesis), Piketty concludes that the fall of communism is the reason people stopped discussing changing the economic system, alternatives to capitalism, and how they should change the system.
'I think we are still in some kind of post-communist trauma, which is not hard to understand because there have been gigantic failures', writes Piketty, leading us to learn from more successful social systems, for example from the social democratic model in Germany, where there is very high tax progression, and then from the USA, but not today's, rather from the period from Roosevelt (1901. – 1909.) to the 1970s, when America was very successful. On these experiments, he says, a different but better economic future should be projected.
