‘A Brief History of Equality’ by Thomas Piketty: In quest of a just world

Aunindyo Chakravarty

IN 2014, Thomas Piketty became a global star. His book, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, topped the New York Times bestseller list. His name and central theses would be discussed in elegant parties in liberal homes, across the world, notwithstanding the fact that the 1,000-page book was largely unread, much like another famous bestseller, Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. It is probably not entirely a coincidence that Piketty’s latest book — about quarter in size of his previous ones — is also a ‘brief history’, this time of ‘equality’.

This remedies a lacuna in Piketty’s oeuvre — the voluminous nature of his intellectual interventions, whether they be his books or the immensely useful World Inequality Database he has created along with his colleague Lucas Chancel. This short tome’s objective is to present Piketty’s fundamental arguments — much circulated among specialists and academics — to a wider readership. It makes two separate, but connected, set of arguments. The first is the historically changing nature of inequality, both within and between countries. The second is his recommendations on what needs to be done to make the world more egalitarian.

Piketty’s historical analysis can be summarised in a few broad points. The first is that the world today is extremely unequal, but it is better than what it was even a hundred years ago. Over the past century, the dominant class of the richest 1 per cent has had to shed not just their share of wealth and income, but also their political and social privileges. This has resulted in a trend towards ‘deconcentration’ of wealth and income over much of the 20th century, but some of that has got reversed since the 1980s. The inequality between countries has reduced since colonialism formally ended, but its legacy continues to this day. Europe and the West became rich not because they followed Adam Smith’s ‘laissez faire’ policies, but because they did the exact opposite: they forcibly captured resources, enslaved workers, set up steep tariff barriers to protect their nascent industries, were fiscally profligate and ran up huge public debts. On the contrary, states like the Chinese and Ottoman empires, which had greater market integration, easier labour movement, low taxes and were fiscally conservative, were unable to compete with European expansionism.

The second half of the book is devoted to Piketty’s prescription on what is to be done to reduce global inequality. Piketty addresses the uncomfortable question of ‘reparations’ for slavery. He asks, if slave-owners were compensated across the world, either by former enslaved colonies, like Haiti, or by the public, as in the case of Britain, shouldn’t descendants of former slaves and indentured workers be compensated by countries and classes which benefited from the system of forced labour? Piketty points to several contemporary examples of reparations to argue that former wrongs need to be corrected by erstwhile beneficiaries to equalise things today.

Piketty’s recommendations for a more just and equal society are centred around a revival of institutions of the welfare state and a progressive taxation system. He shows that the progress made in the 20th century in reducing inequalities was a result of the hard-fought political battles that forced capitalist states in the West to set limits to personal wealth and redistribute national income among a wider population. He argues that this was reversed by the ‘financial liberalisation and the free circulation of capital’ from the 1980s. Piketty supports high ‘confiscatory taxes’ at the upper margins of income and a wealth tax to redistribute income. He says that such policies had existed in the past, in post-war Europe, and they can be revived.

Piketty calls for a ‘vast movement’ by the ‘egalitarian coalition’, which he blames for its failure to present a credible alternative to the ‘Reagan-Thatcher revolution’. Like his other suggestion for a global distribution of taxes paid by multinational companies to every citizen of the world, Piketty’s solutions might appear to be politically naïve, but his heart is in the right place.