Belknap Press
A Brief History of Equality
Key Metrics
- Thomas Piketty
- Belknap Press
- Paperback
- 9780674295469
- -
- -
- Social Science > Social Classes & Economic Disparity
- English
Secure TransactionBook 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?
Author Bio
Thomas Piketty is Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of research articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, Explorations in Economic History, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales.
He has done historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income and wealth, and political conflict.These works have led to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution.
Thomas Piketty is also co-director of the World Inequality Lab and the World Inequality Database, and one of initiators of the Manifesto for the democratization of Europe. He is the author of the international best-sellers Capital in the 21st century (2014) and Capital and ideology (2020).
Source: Paris School of Economics
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