Harvard University Press Blog

Five Reasons Why You Should Read Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality

In his surprising and powerful new work, A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality. We asked him about his impassioned new book: why he wrote it, how it’s optimistic, and what we need to do to continue making progress on creating an equitable world.

This book draws on your earlier works but is also very different. How would you describe the mix?

It’s partly a response to readers’ requests for a short book. My three major books are around a thousand pages each, enough to discourage many motivated citizens from reading them. I review the main lessons from those books here, explaining the basic facts of inequality and the reasons for its persistence and recent growth. But the new book does not content itself with just synthesizing previous ideas and findings. It also presents a new perspective on the history of inequality.

This new perspective seems more optimistic.

It puts more stress on equality, that is, on positive developments over the long term. Since at least the end of the eighteenth century, with the French and American Revolutions and the revolt of the slaves in Haiti in 1791, there has been a general movement toward equality. The march has been nourished by revolts against injustice, within countries as well as internationally, moving us away from societies of privilege and colonialism. It is a movement that has never completely stopped. On income and assets, we are today very, very far from the concentration levels of the early twentieth century, as well as previous centuries. Even since the 1980s, a period of rising concentration, we have continued on the path toward equality as inequalities arising from gender and origin, and between the global North and South, have diminished. In the long term, the march toward equality is very clear. I really want to insist on that.

What does the book tell us about how to continue that progress?

Partly we need to learn our history, to recommit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that have promoted equality. We need to resist cultural separatism and excessive intellectual specialization. We also need to reverse certain trends. A few decades ago, for example, we invented an almost sacred right for people and companies to accumulate fortunes that depended on the public infrastructure of a country and then transfer assets to another jurisdiction, leaving the bill to the rest of the population. It is necessary to put an end to the free movement of capital without tax or social compensation.

You place a stronger emphasis on environmental questions and answers than in the past.

The questions are more urgent and are clearly bound up with questions of inequality. The richest 1% on the planet emit more carbon than the poorest 50%. Nearly four billion people live in the countries that will be the first to suffer the consequences of the lifestyles of the richest. A proportional carbon tax hitting the poor and the rich the same way—and in practice often exonerating the latter—is not the solution. It will only lead to new revolts in the North, as well as the South. Only a strong reduction of inequalities and the significant involvement of the richest countries will resolve these contradictions.

Overall, how would you describe the genre of the book? It’s academic, but also impassioned.

It’s a work of history and social sciences but also a call for civic mobilization. Looking at how we have moved toward equality helps us understand what needs to be done now. Unfortunately, this learning process is often weakened by historical amnesia and the compartmentalization of knowledge. I argue that economic issues are too important to be left to a small class of specialists and leaders. Citizens’ reappropriation of knowledge is essential for transforming power relations. This book contributes to that cause.

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

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Q&A with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital and Ideology

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In his audacious follow-up, Capital and Ideology, he exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. We caught up with him to ask about his new book and to discuss the politics behind the long history of inequality.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century was an unusually ambitious book. What prompted you to write another major book so soon?

I’ve learned a lot since the release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I was invited to countries about which I knew little, met new researchers, and participated in hundreds of debates. All these exchanges pushed me to renew my reflections. To summarize Capital briefly, it showed how, in the twentieth century, the two world wars led to a very strong reduction in the inequalities inherited from the nineteenth century. I also pointed to the disturbing ascent of inequalities since the 1980s. But the book had two main limitations. The first is that it was very Western centered. In this new book, I widen my scope: I examine the history of “ternary societies” [organized into three classes: nobility, clergy, and workers] and societies of owners or proprietors, but I also study slavery societies, colonial regimes, communism, post-communism, social democracy, the case of castes in India, and inequality regimes in Brazil, China, and Russia. The second limitation is that Capital only scratched the surface of the deep question of the ideologies that support inequalities. It was a black box that I decided to open.

What is the fundamental argument you’re making about these ideologies?

I tell the story of many unequal regimes, and the conclusion that emerges is that dominant ideologies are always much more fragile than we imagine. Inequality is a political construction, not the product of “natural” forces of the economy or technology. Every society needs to tell itself a plausible story to show why inequalities are acceptable, to justify the organization of social groups, and to explain the nature of property, borders, the tax system, and education. Revisiting this story allows us to see our current ideologies from a different perspective. We often have the impression that inequalities from the past were necessarily unfair and despotic and that those of the present are necessarily meritocratic, dynamic, open. I do not believe a word of it. Macron's “leaders in the rope line,” the job creators of Trump, the glorification of fortune whatever its number of zeros: all this speech is as religious in its way as traditional and explicitly religious justifications for inequality.

In your account, history has lurched from one regime of inequality to another, but you’re nonetheless optimistic. Why?

History shows that it is impossible to predict the evolution of regimes of inequality. Take Sweden: we sometimes like to say that the Swedish social model feeds on a very old culture, going back to the Vikings. In fact, Sweden was for a long time an extremely unequal country. The census system until 1911 stipulated that the owners of the biggest fortunes could have up to one hundred votes per person! Political mobilizations have transformed the country. If someone had predicted in 1910 that Sweden would become a social democratic country, nobody would have taken it seriously. That’s why I do not believe that the current system is indestructible or cannot be transformed.

If inequality has been rising since the 1980s, why haven’t political parties mobilized to reduce it, as they did after World War II?

The main political parties have radically changed since the 1980s. In the social democratic era that followed the war, the poorest and least-educated classes identified with parties of the left, whether Democratic, Labour, Socialist, Communist, or Social-Democratic. But in the age of hyper-capitalism, parties of the electoral left ceased to make improving the lot of the disadvantaged their main focus. Instead, they turned their attention primarily to serving the interests of the winners in the educational competition. Left-wing political parties and movements turned themselves into representatives of the highly educated. We now have political systems dominated by two elites: what I call the wealthy “merchant right”—the Republicans, the Conservatives, and so on—and the highly educated and generally prosperous “Brahmin left,” represented by the Democrats, Labour, and Social Democrats. The least advantaged no longer see themselves in the electoral left. This has left an opening for nativists and other opportunistic politicians to seek their support. But this may be changing, even in the United States, as catering to the highly educated does not reflect the egalitarian values of an important part of the Democratic electorate.

You conclude the book with a series of recommendations for economic and social reform, which include the adoption of German-style co-management of businesses.

The real challenge of our societies is that of power: there has been a capture of economic power and politics by private money. I sketch in the book a form of “participatory socialism,” the opposite of hyper-state Soviet socialism, which led to disastrous results. Co-management offers this possibility. Only Germany and the Nordic countries have followed this path since the 1950s, but the Labour Party in the United Kingdom and the Democrats in the United States have begun to reflect on it. In Germany, employees are allocated half of the voting rights on the board of directors for large companies. In Sweden, it's a third, but this also applies to smaller companies. Such a system has made it possible to have less excess than elsewhere in the payment of executive salaries and a better investment in employees. I propose to go further, by limiting the voting rights of the largest shareholders to allow smaller shareholders to enter the game and form coalitions with employees.

You also want to reform property tax so that it funds a “universal endowment of capital”? What’s that?

Currently, half of the population inherits nothing at all. I imagine a kind of “legacy for all.” At the age of 25, all people would receive a capital endowment of something like 120,000 euros, which represents 60 percent of the average wealth per adult in France. This could be used to buy your home: this would stop society being divided between those who pay rents—often generation after generation—and those who, also over the generations, own and receive rents. It would also encourage people to create a business and motivate employees to buy shares in their company. This would be financed not only by the proceeds of the inheritance tax but also by a progressive tax on net wealth. This new form of progressive property tax would ensure the permanent circulation of property and guarantee that very large wealth holdings do not perpetuate themselves.

Another area you focus on is education.

If we look for an explanation for the halving of the rate of economic growth since the 1990s, I suggest we should be interested in educational underinvestment. Education expenditure has stagnated in all developed countries while the number of students has risen sharply.

Do you consider the book a blueprint for getting beyond capitalism?

We can’t promise the abolition of capitalism without debating long and hard about precisely what will be put in its place. I try to contribute to that debate.

You’ve said in French interviews that you prefer this book to Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Yes. I think I’ve made some progress and that this new book is much better. If you read only one of the two, please read this one!

How to Plant a Forest

For this week’s University Press Week Blog Tour, Lucia Jacobs offers us a glimpse of environmental stewardship as seen through the activities of the ubiquitous squirrel, a species native to the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia from the Eocene Epoch onward.

Lucia Jacobs is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC-Berkeley and was a 2019 Radcliffe Fellow. Her work synthesizes concepts from ecology, animal behavior, cognitive science, and neuroscience in order to understand the evolution of universal cognitive traits such as spatial memory and navigation. Her new book on animal behavior and economics is under contract with Harvard University Press.

As a young child, I spent so much time with one favorite sapling that my mother fashioned me a stick chair so that I could sit more comfortably next to my beloved Oaky (who turned out to be a sweet gum). Perhaps I should not have been surprised a couple of decades later when I committed myself to a life of trees and squirrels, tromping the paths among the mighty oaks and beeches of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as a Ph.D. student.

At Princeton, I was trying to answer a deceptively simple question: why do two kinds of squirrels, living almost on top of each other, have two different banking systems? The eastern gray squirrel, the classic denizen of Central Park, is a stockbroker. This squirrel acquires diverse types of stocks all through August, September, and October, spreading out the risk by hiding each nut in a different location so that if one is found the rest will be safe. Having made this initial investment, the squirrel then spends November through March working furiously on her or his portfolio, checking its value with internal calculations: Is the nut present or has it been stolen by a competitor? Or, has the nut germinated and its caloric value come crashing down in an annual rhythm of hyperinflation, with all the precious nut calories escaping and becoming useless (to a squirrel) green leaf calories?

But that is only one system. The red squirrel, a small neat package with white eyeliner and a big mouth, practices a whole other economy. This squirrel uses its big mouth to scream out warnings to all animals (humans included) who would encroach on its precious space. Quite unlike the flannel-suited grays, the little red squirrel has solved the problem of winter survival by another time-tested method: build a castle of pine cones and scream obscenities at anyone who passes by.

Why two such different economies in two squirrel species that can often be found in the same forest? The gray’s acorns and hickory nuts are big and juicy. But are also tiny time bombs of hyperinflation in case of germination. The red squirrel, unlike its gray neighbors, can subsist on pine cones. That is why reds are found in the piney ends of a forest. Pine cones are poor provender in comparison to nuts and acorns but they come with a hidden advantage. When covered with the debris of torn and de-seeded cones that accumulate over time, pine cones can last, without maintenance, for many years. In this case, the pine tree has lost. The cone has not stayed on the tree long enough for the scales to open and the tiny seeds to be wind-dispersed. The baby pine trees die as embryos. And like Chanticleer on his dung heap, the murderous red squirrel sits on top of the midden proclaiming his wealth and property to all in earshot. Because cones refrigerated in the midden can last, the squirrel only has to defend its small property, a few pine trees, to survive.

Why does the gray not follow the red’s strategy? Even if her bounty germinates, why does a gray not defend a single tree and put all her acorns in one basket? Well, because trees are not stupid either. The tree exacts its price for prior years of large-seeded "free gifts” by occasionally falling silent and remaining fruitless. Not just one tree but whole forests of oaks and hickories vary their production unpredictably. Branches groan with seed one year but produce only a smattering for two years after that. This is known as the masting strategy of trees, and it brutally reestablishes the balance between the squirrel population and tree reproduction. When the stocks crash, squirrels starve or emigrate. Trees depend on squirrels to propagate their offspring which, over time, become our forests. If there are too few squirrels, then the nuts will fall to the ground and be eaten by weevils, under the shade of parental branches. If there are too many squirrels, then all the offspring are eaten. But throw out a couple of masting years and regain the balance—just enough squirrels to help bury just enough nuts that could lead to the germination of thousands of baby trees. This is how large-seeded tree species, producing the seeds that are worth caching, achieve a delicate balance with the squirrels.

So, there you have it—the two economies of two squirrels, the red and the gray. Choose the life of the red: a territorial bantam cock, all bristling fur and trilling pronouncements, protecting precious small territory of cone-bearing trees, never being able to let down your guard.  Or choose the life of a gray: a flannel-suited stockbroker, workaholic while the stocks are available in the fall, investing the bounteous crops into a diverse portfolio, which must be managed, never counting on any one stock for your long-term survival. Know that if you take the acorn eater’s path (and your path was taken many millions of years ago and is now firmly inscribed in your genetic code) you permanently forgo the larder and live instead the life of a wanderer, caching treasures, relying on your wits and memory to stay ahead of the competition. It is the gray squirrels and their two cousins, the fox and the little southern flying squirrel, that are the environmental stewards of our forests. They are an important key to how our forests are planted, how they grow, and how they persist.

5 Questions: Kim Clausing on Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital

With the winds of trade war blowing as they have not done in decades, and Left and Right flirting with protectionism, leading economist Kimberly Clausing forcefully shows how a free and open economy is still the best way to advance the interests of working Americans in her new book Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital. We asked her a few questions about the book to help us navigate the debates currently convulsing national and international economics and politics.

We're living in a time of political polarization, but many on the left and the right are in agreement in their hostility to globalization. Is this agreement misleading? Are they concerned about the same things?

Those that are hostile to globalization are often worried about legitimate concerns: the difficulty of supporting a family in today’s marketplace, the fiercely competitive nature of labor markets, and the sense that future generations may be left behind by forces they cannot control. Both groups are skeptical of trade agreements that they view as putting business interests before workers’ interests, and they are inclined to blame foreign competition for many of the difficulties facing workers.

In America today, while these themes are seen on both the left and the right, there are still differences. The right is far more skeptical of immigration than the left, and more likely to view foreign workers as a threat. The left is far more skeptical of international business than the right; they are more likely to be concerned about too much power in the hands of multinational corporations.

What would you say each side is missing?

There are three crucial arguments that both sides need to carefully consider. First, while the worries of American workers are very real, global markets are not the sole force responsible for the present state of affairs. Many other factors are more important, including dramatic technological change, increased market concentration (i.e., more companies with “market power”), changes in social norms, and changes in policy.

Second, global markets come with benefits for workers that are insufficiently celebrated. We all are heavily reliant on trade as consumers, but beyond that, trade is also an integral part of our work lives in positive ways; some workers have jobs that produce exports, and many other workers rely on imports as key parts of their production process. Immigration has been a great strength of the U.S. economy in the past, and it is absolutely a great strength at present. Immigrants spur innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation, and they provide skills that are not easily found in the native population. Immigrants also ease the budget pressures of our swelling retirement-aged population.

Third, curbing global integration is more likely to harm than help American workers. Tariffs are regressive taxes that fall much more heavily on the poor than on the well-off. Trade barriers and trade wars create new labor market “shocks” that cause job loss and hardship; both farmers and auto workers risk losing jobs. Trade wars also alienate our allies, distancing us from important partners that we need to address issues like climate change and tax competition. Finally, America and its workers will be stronger with more, not less, immigration.

Most of us are familiar with arguments in support of free trade from right of center. You think there are good reasons why those on the left should also support it. Could you explain?

As just described, curtailing globalization is a foolish policy response to the problems of American workers. And, importantly, it distracts us from far easier and more effective ways to help workers. For example, consider the new tax law that just took effect in 2018. That law will create additional deficits of over $1.5 trillion (over ten years) in order to pay for tax cuts that mostly benefit those at the top of the income distribution, and the bill provides egregious new loopholes (such as the pass-through deduction) that make our tax system both less equitable and less efficient.

A far better approach would be to genuinely support workers with changes in tax policy. For example, expanding the earned income tax credit and providing wage insurance for displaced workers would be great first steps in that direction. Investing in workers through adequate funding of infrastructure, research, and education is crucial. Expanding the safety net to make health insurance more secure is an essential step. In contrast, the tax bill moved in the opposite direction by repealing the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, an important pillar of the Affordable Care Act.

In terms of economic policy, we can do a lot better. Protectionist trade policies, and the gratuitous blaming of immigrants, are not only wrong on their face, but they also distract us from urgent economic policy priorities.

But you're not complacent about the effects of globalization. You admit it has real victims. Is the question for you, then, not whether or not there should be globalization, but what sort of globalization we should have and how to change or compensate for it?

Exactly. We should remain open to the world economy, but there are many important policy steps that we can take to make our global economy more compatible with the needs of workers, responding to decades of wage stagnation and surging income inequality.

As one step, we can also work to foster better trade agreements that counter policy competition and address areas that require global cooperation. But many key responses are steps that the United States can take on its own. We can do a far better job supporting workers and communities by making investments in workers, infrastructure, and education. We can reform the tax system to make sure that growth in national income benefits nearly all Americans. This means lower taxes for those at the bottom, and it also means higher contributions from those at the top, but careful reforms can reduce the gimmicks and shenanigans that litter our present tax system, creating more tax revenue at reasonable tax rates. And, importantly, we can pursue a better partnership with the business community, where we address undue market power and encourage transparency and social responsibility on issues like taxation and labor. The business community, in turn, will benefit from open markets and fair, simple regulations and taxes.

Are you optimistic that we can shape globalization so that it serves progressive, as well as more conservative, goals?

At present, political polarization is a big hurdle. In the book, I have a few starter ideas for how to combat that. Foremost, it is important for policy makers and thinkers to focus on pragmatic policy options that respond to the needs of workers without turning to extreme or counterproductive solutions. Raising barriers and walls are steps that are likely to harm American workers. Socialism (defined traditionally) is not a remotely viable solution, but there are many smart, reasonable things we can do to help workers and keep America economically strong and open.

On Human Rights in an Unequal World

In the space of less than a decade, Samuel Moyn has defined—and largely created—the field of the history of human rights. With 2010’s radically revisionist The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he revealed how our modern notion of human rights was birthed only in the 1970s, showing their rise to have been a precarious, contingent, and uneven development. Now, with Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn places the history of the human rights project alongside the precisely concurrent ascendance of neoliberalism to consider how the age of human rights has been a golden age for the rich. In the exchange below we pose a few questions to Moyn about this new work that George Soros says “breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”

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Q: Your first book on human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, was published in 2010. You begin Not Enough by noting that “no account of how the present emerged is definitive for long,” and point to the feeling that history is accelerating at a pace in our present age that makes that especially true. How would you characterize the ways in which the transformations of the years between these books have changed your perspective on the origins and achievements of the human rights movement?

Like so many others, I used to be primarily concerned about the viability of the liberal international order consecrated when the Cold War ended. I was curious how human rights became the moral lingua franca of international affairs at that moment, and my research for The Last Utopia took me into histories of ethics and politics as they led to an international order in which human rights matter and social movements pursue them. What was left out, however, was economics—even though I argued in The Last Utopia that, for most of modern times, socialism appealed to more people for far longer than international human rights principles. Already when I wrote up that first book in 2008-9, the global financial crisis was helping make its framing incomplete or even obsolete. Almost ten years later, in 2016-17, I wrote this sequel placing distributional justice and political economy much closer to the heart of the history of human rights than before. (I only hope the spike in populism that year has not made my new book incomplete or obsolete!)

Q: One way of describing Not Enough is that it’s a world history of how people have thought about the fair distribution of the good things in life—who should get what—and you track the shifting global focus from equality (a concern for the share of those good things enjoyed by the least fortunate with respect to the share going to the world’s most well off) to sufficiency (a concern for the share going to the least fortunate only with respect to some minimum level of provision). The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, among others, has argued that inequality shouldn’t concern us as long as sufficiency is satisfied, and Steven Pinker has of course just published another bestseller arguing that humankind has never been better off, in large part because of the steady improvements in absolute quality of life for many in the developing world. Make the case for equality.

Equality might matter as a moral principle in its own right, as many philosophers other than Frankfurt have contended. From the Jacobins in the French Revolution to John Rawls, some modicum of equality always has had a certain number of proponents, though they have debated what precisely requires equalization and how far to justify departures from perfect equality, as most did. But as a history book, instead of arguing directly on behalf of equality in response, I just try to show how many from the French Revolution through just a few decades ago have held out for a more ambitious equality in the face of less exacting obligations. Indeed, one of my goals in Not Enough is to locate the first thinker who contended that sufficient provision is all that morality requires of our institutions—I claim it was Thomas Paine.

I also track how early socialists slowly took on board distributional equality as a norm and, much later, postcolonial voices were the first to demand truly global equality. By the end, the goal is to show how unusual it is to have advocates of sufficiency alone as prominent as Frankfurt or Pinker, in the absence of egalitarian movements and politics, which were rife across modern history. It would have appalled many of our ancestors to see how many people today agree that it is morally acceptable how far the rich are allowed to tower over the rest as long as the poor are at least somewhat better off.

Making Sense of Neoliberalism

Most people would likely claim a general understanding of neoliberalism as a movement of laissez-faire principles aimed at ensuring free markets and an “unfettered” economy. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, one of the first intellectual histories of the movement, Quinn Slobodian shows that, in the beginning, neoliberalism was actually about shielding the economic world from the political world—about protecting the global economy, not freeing it. For Slobodian, neoliberalism is ultimately less a theory of the market or economics than of law and state, and his work gives us a much clearer sense of how the old world of empire gave way in the twentieth century not to a quasi-libertarian world of markets but to international institutions that were highly active in prescribing trade policies and rules about competition. Below, Slobodian introduces his study, and recounts its origins in a late-1990s moment when passion could often outpace understanding.

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If I had to give this book an origin point, it would be almost 20 years ago, at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. For people who don’t know much about it, a famous coalition of “teamsters and turtles,” meaning environmentalists along with labor unions, students, anarchists, old hippies, and assorted others shut down the meeting and shook the organization to its core. Despite the director-general’s famous call to “re-brand” in the early 2000s, the WTO hasn’t completed a negotiating round since. So, the protest was a big deal.

I was a junior in college in Portland at the time, a few hours south of Seattle, and for reasons mostly to do with laziness and ennui, I didn’t go. I remember watching the protests on our small box TV with a coat hanger stuck in the back with the sinking feeling that “oh no, a world historical event is taking place that I passed on to watch some Lars von Trier movies on VHS.”

My friends and classmates felt activated, painting huge papier-mâché fists and strapping them to their backpacks, filled with certainty. Myself, I felt demobilized and filled mostly with disorientation.

The 1990s were a weird time to come of age. Middle class North American white kids like me were profiting from everything that went under the decade’s buzzword of globalization but also saw it as something ominous, sometimes verging on evil. We were the Adbusters generation. My sixteen-year-old sister was printing small stickers attacking McDonald’s viscerally. I wrote and photocopied a zine that said on the cover in block letters: OPEN YOUR EYES.

But open them to what exactly? The world economy was like the Nothing from my favorite childhood film, The Neverending Story, an anonymous, faceless force that seemed to swallow everything in its path, extinguishing particularity; it Coca-Colonized, to use a term of the time, squashed dreams of global modernization and turned the Third World back into a labor colony to make our stuff.

Before there was fake news there were what I saw then as fake needs, created by advertising and the mind control of the blizzard of logos—the swooshes and stripes that now adorn the cool kids in Berlin and Brooklyn. Back then we were all little Frankfurt Schoolers, or Frankfurt Pre-Schoolers, distrustful of irony though we were steeped in it, seeking elusive authenticity, wanting to unveil, unmask, expose, and upend—in my case, preferably from my desk, typewriter, and the warm chairs of the library.

So this book came out of a simple question that germinated at that time: why would anyone defend the great Nothing of the world economy, the power that forced the hands of democratically elected governments, anonymously imposed new rules and strictures and only rewarded us with what I saw in my adolescent mind as a disposable culture that would choke us all with plastic, garbage, and refuse before I even had a chance to die a natural death. (Capturing some of the melodrama of the time here).

The Paradise Papers: Why You Should Care

The trove of records known as the “Paradise Papers” unveiled this week by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has exposed the financial hideaways of iconic brands and power brokers across the political spectrum. Among the revelations resulting from the leak have been ties between Russia and the United States commerce secretary, secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the offshore interests of the queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world. Brooke Harrington, a sociologist who trained as a wealth manager for the investigation that became her 2016 book Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, served as a key analyst for the ICIJ in their work on the Paradise Papers, and has been an increasingly vital source for global media seeking to understand all that’s come to light. Below, Harrington explains why the ongoing exposure of the offshore financial system is about so much more than palace intrigue and political embarrassment.

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“So what?” This question keeps appearing in my Facebook feed, via friends of friends in America, in response to news of the Paradise Papers leak. Some are confused by the complexity of the revelations—what the heck is U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross doing with the Putin family?—and some are distracted by the bizarre array of household names coming together in the story. Fancy Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II having something in common with Martha Stewart and Formula 1 race car driver Louis Hamilton!

What the Paradise Papers tell us, as the Panama Papers did earlier, is that above a certain level of wealth, everybody is using offshore. And they’re not just avoiding tax: lots of people put assets offshore even if they come from places that don’t tax income, inheritances, wealth, or capital gains. They’re putting assets in Bermuda, or Panama, or one of the dozens of other offshore financial centers because they don’t want to pay back their creditors, or submit to fines imposed by a judge, or split assets with a divorcing spouse. Tax avoidance, although it gets the bulk of the media coverage, is only part of that larger, and much more troubling picture.

Leaks like the Paradise Papers tell a story of rampant law avoidance. That’s what really makes the ultra-wealthy different from you and me: for them, the laws are mostly optional. Several of the wealth managers I interviewed for Capital without Borders—people who worked for firms very much like the ones exposed in the recent leaks—marvelled at the degree to which their clients’ wealth and power put them “above the law.” This creates a political problem, especially in democracies where legitimacy depends on all citizens being equal in their obligation to obey the laws of the land. When people see that whole groups of people simply escape that obligation, they get angry and start looking for scapegoats. Thus, Thomas Piketty has linked the use of offshore to the rise of right-wing ultra-nationalist movements, which misdirect that populist anger—encouraging people to blame the poor and marginalized, rather than the lawless ultra-rich.

Thus, my answer to the “so what?” question is political as well as economic. Certainly, the tax evasion part matters tremendously: the former US tax commissioner estimated that honest taxpayers bear an extra 15 percent tax burden to compensate for wealthy Americans’ failure to pay their fair share. And even with honest taxpayers taking up some of the slack, public services like transportation, health care and education still get cut, damaging chances for upward mobility so essential to a dynamic capitalist economy.

Inevitably, this economic stagnation intersects with the concentration of political power to produce conditions that look depressingly familiar to historians: feudal, in fact. When Oxfam reports that just eight people own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of humanity, comparisons to the Middle Ages don’t seem so far fetched. Indeed, this week the Guardian reported that a UK economist believes inequality has become so extreme that we should revisit a medieval document as a model for contemporary action. The Charter of the Forest, which turns 800 years old this year, asserted the right of ordinary people to food and shelter, and challenged that of nobles to monopolize all the resources. That 21st century conditions compel us to re-learn the lessons of medieval history suggests the formidable power of offshore. And that is why we should care.

The Shape of Things to Come

We’re going to be talking about 2016 for a long, long time. Like, forever. But time doesn’t stop, and history doesn’t end, and 2017’s already got a look about it. Here, then, is a slate of new and recent books fit for the shape of things to come.

In Democracy: A Case Study historian David Moss demonstrates that American democracy has survived and thrived from one generation to the next on the basis not principally of harmony but of conflict—sometimes intense conflict—mediated by shared ideals and a common faith in the nation’s system of democratic self-governance. For Moss, the important question is never whether there is tension in our politics, but rather whether that tension is constructive or destructive. But if those shared ideals erode and that common faith starts to go? Buckle up.

Speaking of Russia, Gregory Carleton lays bare how war is the unifying thread of their national epic. Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but in Russia: The Story of War Carleton shows how Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe or Christianity or civilization itself, often at immense cost.

From the story of Russia to the notion of the “Muslim World,” the longstanding misconception that 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single religio-political entity. As Cemil Aydin asks in The Idea of the Muslim World, how did such a mistaken belief arise, why is it so widespread, and how can its grip be loosened so that a more fruitful discussion about politics in Muslim societies can begin?

Misconceptions make the world go round, though, and that of the “Muslim World” has helped make the West go right. For that we’ve got Far-Right Politics in Europe, a critical look at the far right throughout Europe that reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges posed to the EU’s liberal-democratic order. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg make clear that these movements are determined to gain power through legitimate electoral means, and that they are succeeding.

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies, but nationalism and anti-immigrant fervor are big in the mix. The movement of peoples rouses passions, but many are actually very confused about how to feel about immigration—they are sympathetic to individual immigrants and their reasons for wanting to migrate, but concerned about the overall impact that immigration is having on their society. In Strangers in Our Midst, political theorist David Miller seeks to balance the rights of immigrants with the legitimate concerns of citizens, and defends the right of democratic states to control their borders and decide upon the future size, shape, and cultural make-up of their populations. But those rights don’t mean that just any border regime is fair or acceptable, so Miller also explains what is owed to different categories of immigrant, and what their responsibilities are once admitted.

Debates over immigration are of course often tied to squabbling over the proper role of the state in providing for those within its borders. The increasingly familiar idea of an unconditional basic income is meant to alleviate the pressures mounting on the traditional welfare state, and two world authorities outline the concept in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. With trials underway or in the works in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and even Oakland, basic income seems like an idea whose time has finally come.

Part of the argument for basic income is that it could help to alleviate the economic inequality that characterizes our nations and our world. A couple of years back, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped to thrust income inequality into public debate, and now a new volume, After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, is coming to both kick the tires on Piketty’s argument and help steer us towards means of addressing the seemingly intractable problems that he highlights. Edited by Heather Boushey, Brad DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, the book includes work from Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, Branko Milanovic, Emmanuel Saez, and others, along with a substantial new contribution from Piketty himself.

Here in the U.S., every day brings news of how radically president-elect Trump may shift the nation’s course. Healthcare reform has of course been a pillar of his platform, which makes Miriam Laugesen’s Fixing Medical Prices ever more relevant. Fees charged by physicians in the U.S. are the most expensive in the world, and Laugesen uses the book to introduce readers to a largely unknown group called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee, whose periodic advisory recommendations to Medicare set off chain reactions across the entire health care system. Why would a hugely powerful group carry a name so plain? Because if you’re an interest group stealthily controlling American healthcare policy you’ve every interest in bureaucratic cover.

A few more books for Trump’s America: Sam Abrams’s Education and the Commercial Mindset is a careful study of the benefits and limits of applying market solutions to improving education, a cause to which incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her life. Carol Sanger’s About Abortion explores the emotional cost and social consequences of terminating pregnancy in the United States, a subject about which there’s loud and contentious public argument but great silence at more intimate levels; the book connects abortion secrecy to the distorted political conversation that results in this flood of state laws attempting to limit abortion access by increasingly bolder means. Lisa Goff’s Shantytown, USA was written as a history but may yet become a travel guide. And Yascha Mounk’s The Age of Responsibility, which shows how the notion of personal responsibility has become central to our moral vocabulary, political rhetoric, and public policies, aims us towards a more equitable future by forcing us to rethink our mutual responsibilities as citizens.

A lot to think about, a lot to read, and much more to come. Be excellent to each other.

Globalization's Three Unbundlings

Richard Baldwin had one goal in writing The Great Convergence: to change the way you think about globalization. His central argument is that revolutionary changes in communication technology fundamentally changed globalization around 1990, setting in motion a reversal of the “Great Divergence” that had propelled the rise of today’s rich nations from the early nineteenth century. In the excerpt below, Baldwin offers a broader view of the history of trade, industrialization, and growth that sets the stage for his full consideration of the logic of the new globalization.

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When transportation involved wind power by sea and animal power by land, few items could be profitably shipped over anything but the shortest distance. This fact made production a hostage of consumption since people were tied to the land. Production, in other words, was forcibly bundled with consumption.

Globalization can be thought of as a progressive reversal of this forcible bundling. But the bundling was not enforced by shipping costs alone. Three costs of distance mattered: the cost of moving goods, the cost of moving ideas, and the cost of moving people. It is useful to think of the three costs as forming three constraints that limit the separation of production and consumption.

One of this book’s core assertions is that understanding the evolving nature of globalization requires a sharp distinction among these three “separation” costs. Since the early nineteenth century, the costs of moving goods, ideas, and people all fell, but not all at once. Shipping costs fell radically a century and a half before communication costs did. And face-to-face interactions remain very costly even today.

Thinking about why the sequence matters is facilitated by a new view of globalization—what I call the “three cascading constraints” perspective. The new view is best explained by lacing it onto the back of a quick gallop through history.

The Pre-Globalized World and Globalization’s First Acceleration
In the pre-globalization world, distance isolated people and production to such an extent that the world economy was little more than a patchwork of village-level economies. Things started to change when the cost of moving goods fell. Transport technologies improved in a process that fostered and was fostered by the Industrial Revolution.