A Brief History of Equality

A Brief History of Equality is a non-fiction book by the French economist Thomas Piketty translated by Steven Rendall from the original 2021 Une brève histoire de l'égalité,^[1] about wealth redistribution,^[2] in which Piketty describes why he is optimistic about the future.^[3]

Overview

In this 288-page book targeting an audience of citizens, not economists, Piketty summarizes his two previous books, his 2014 696-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century^[4] and his 2019 1150-page book Capital and Ideology.^[5][6] In Capital, Piketty said that a possible remedy for inequality lay in a "global tax on wealth".^[7] In A Brief History, he developed the concept of a progressive increase in the tax on the wealthy.^[6]

Reviews

In her Financial Times' review, economist Diane Coyle said that in A Brief History, Piketty advocates for politico-economic change to reduce inequalities but does not describe practical solutions for achieving that goal.^[8]

The Literary Review described the book as "an activist's history"—a manifesto as well as an overview of the past.^[9]

In his review in the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said that he doubts that—without capitalism—the erosion of inequality and developments in economics and technology that Piketty described could have happened.^[10]

While Piketty did not make predictions about the future, his work—which also includes his previous publications such as Capital in the Twenty-First Century—is "partly responsible" for the move away from the "hypercapitalism" of the twenty-first century, according to Columbia Journalism School's Nicholas Lemann in his New York Times review.^[11]

Piketty condensed twenty years of his research into 300 pages with the goal of making it more accessible to a wider readership than Capital in the Twenty-First Century, according to Antoine Reverchon in his Le Monde book review. Reverchon said that Piketty's effort was worthwhile at a time when the left is mindlessly attempting to bring too many issues together under the same umbrella—"environmentalism, reformism, feminism, post-colonialism, anti-capitalism". Piketty calls for the state to increase access to quality health care, education, employment through the progressive implementation of taxation on the most wealthy. He also called for a "decommodification" of certain sectors that have become privatized including education, health, transport and energy. Piketty recognizes the real and historic fears of Soviet socialism and central planning—his socialism is participatory.^[6]

References