Brief History of Equality

As usual Piketty provides a thoroughly researched, rigorous tour through the history of economic growth and the distribution of that growth. Along the way he spends a good amount of time examining the choices and social causes of these developments, demonstrating the degree to which current inequalities are strongly rooted in the past.

This book is essentially a condensed version of his previous book, Capital and Ideology, and if you've read that book you can probably pass on this one. If you're more interested in the policy implications of inequalities and want a briefer review of the historical causes of them, you're better off with this book. If instead you want to dig more into the statistics and analyses of these inequalities, the previous book will be better (as long as you're willing to devote ~50 hours to it). Still highly recommend

Part of the appeal.of this book was the perspective of the author, as a French economist, outside the American political paradigm to which I am most accostomed. The historical perspective was excellent and data-driven, and repeatedly made me.say "Wow!'" out loud. The foundation of colonialism is not always a cheery thing, but Piketty follows the data. It's hard to hear those data about the last 40 years and the backsliding of equality that has occurred via intentional policy choices, but for that reason, I think this book is essential reading.

Piketty has three objectives in presenting a brief history of equality. The first is to define equality, and describe its behavior over the past couple of centuries. The second is to determine the motivations and mechanisms supporting and opposing equality. And the third objective is to extrapolate supportive motivations and mechanisms into the future to extend and improve equality. There are a number of subsidiary objectives, the most important of which is to establish restorative justice for people and places ravaged by the economic and political systems set up to feed the growth of colonial and neocolonial empires.

The notion of equality shifts between equality of opportunity for intangibles, such as suffrage and education, and equality of outcome for tangibles, such as income and property. Measures of equality should be multidimensional (social, economic, environmental) to provide both broad determinations of equality and guidance for governance. The mechanisms are principally taxation, both progressive and confiscatory; a redistributive state, mainly in terms of welfare, but also for reparations and compensation; and democracy in social and corporate governance. The motivations, apart from the titular one, are the development of a transnational or global infrastructure to support continued progress, redressing past injustices and the downward and outward diffusion of power and resources.

A Brief History of Equality is a response, in part, to requests that Piketty write a concise summary of his other, more massive and detailed books (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Capital and Ideology, Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century — none of which I've read). Given that motivation A Brief History of Equality is heavy on vision and light on details.

Piketty is a socialist, but not of the fire-breathing, smash capitalism kind. He's more of a social democrat, wanting to harness capitalism using taxes and democracy to evenly distribute capitalist benefits while ensuring that capitalist processes are always directed toward socially beneficial ends. Like Marxists, Piketty has a totalizing worldview, but one grounded in practical matters, such as finance and democracy, rather than in hypothetical armies (eventually) driven forward by metaphysical conceits. The grounding in practical matters adds weight and force to Piketty's ideas, as argued by the historical analysis in Equality. But even granting full credit to Piketty's analyses of cause and effect (which are light, and largely have the flavor of “after, therefore because” without further digging into the references), the scope of his worldview makes it hard to understand the mechanisms by which these matters are extrapolated into the future, and how they would work in the future to achieve their ends. The latter problem Equality handles by reference to democratic governance in corporate, transnational, and global scope; the former problem Equality does not handle at all.

I'm very glad that Piketty wrote this more accessible update to his material. His other books felt a little intimidating but this was readable while still containing so many important ideas. Even though some of the examples and vocabulary still went over my head, I found myself highlighting a paragraph every few pages.

I read this after [b:The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism|1237300|The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism|Naomi Klein|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1442590618l/1237300.SY75.jpg|2826418], which had made me feel somewhat pessimistic about the future and at a loss for what a functional globalized society could look like. Klein's book did a lot to point out the flaws in Friedman's economic model but didn't provide as much of an answer about what might be better. At times, it paints a pretty grim picture of humanity.

Piketty's ideas seemed to perfectly fill the gap - he is generally optimistic about our capacity to move towards equality over time, while still being completely realistic about how much work it requires to do so. He has many example of concrete policies that could be implemented to increase equality.

If anything, I wish it had felt more actionable, but I'll admit this is probably hard to do. I did appreciate that he mentioned whenever a specific government was trying to implement something similar to what he was describing.

To me, this feels like required reading for anyone who is losing hope in humanity's ability to "play nice", making a compelling argument that in helping each other and working together, we can all benefit.

Nothing new if you’ve been paying attention but it’s all clearly stated with lots of evidence readily available. If you only read one book about wealth redistribution, this would be a good one to choose.