A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A Public Books Best Book of the Year
"An opportunity for readers to see Piketty bring his larger argument
about the origins of inequality and his program for fighting it into
high relief."
--Nicholas Lemann, New York Times
The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but
sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward
equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect
introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.
It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased
dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations.
No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in
this surprising and powerful new work, 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.
Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great
movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the
growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the
building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social
struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all,
Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just
distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender
inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the
rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and
ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty
argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional,
legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a
lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia
and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual
compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of
people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us
how. The future is up to us.
