Piketty’s latest oeuvre: A Brief History of Equality

A Brief History of Equality, written by Thomas Piketty, published by Harvard University Press is priced at Rs.799. Economist Thomas Piketty summarises his previous works to make his research accessible to a wider audience, writes TCA Ranganathan Professor of economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and associate chair at the Paris School of Economics, Thomas Piketty attained global fame with his best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which highlighted wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the 18th century. The book argued that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this would cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. Piketty proposed improving education systems arguing that diffusion of knowledge, skills, and ideas of productivity would act as main mechanisms to lower inequality. In 2019, his next book Capital and Ideology also became a bestseller. It broadened Piketty’s earlier scope by focusing on the sociology of inequality, experienced in various societies in history. The book’s central thesis was that inequality is not an accident but rather a feature of capitalism that can be reversed only through state intervention. It argued that throughout history, elites have tried to justify inequality by claiming it is natural and that the status quo brings stability, but these are biased excuses, shaped by self-interest. The book argued that unless capitalism is reformed, democracies worldwide will flounder. The above two books were voluminous in size and encyclopaedic in scope. In contrast, the book under review is a pithy 244 pages presented in ten chapters in which Piketty summarises his previous works, Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology to make his research more accessible to a wider audience not necessarily economists. Much of the current discussion on inequality focuses on the period since 1980, when the benefits of growth began to accrue more narrowly to the rich than before. While discussing this phenomenon, Piketty acknowledges that there was an earlier optimistic narrative of the world’s astounding progress toward equality during the 19th century. Life expectancy rose from 26 to 72 years and, with the spread of compulsory state-provided education, literacy rate grew from 10 to 85 percent. Slavery and colonialism, once endemic, were substantially abolished. Perhaps half the population of the developed world is now at least middle class, whereas before the 20th century there was no middle class to speak of. The right to vote, formerly restricted even in democracies to male property owners, was well on its way to becoming universal. What prompted this progress? Piketty has a straightforward answer: the advent of progressive taxes on income and wealth, and rise of the comprehensive welfare state. Taxes reduced inequality and paid for the welfare state, which provided education, healthcare, old-age pensions and protection against severe deprivation. In Capital, Piketty advocated a “global tax on wealth” as a possible remedy for inequality. In A Brief History, he develops the concept of a…