A Brief History of Equality

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A Public Books Best Book of the Year It’s easy to be pessimistic these days. We know that inequality has increased dramatically over the past two generations. Its ravages are increasingly impossible to ignore. But the grand sweep of history gives us reasons for hope. In this short and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress, the world’s leading economist of inequality shows that over the centuries we have been moving, fitfully and inconsistently but inexorably, toward greater equality. Thomas Piketty guides us through the seismic movements that have made the modern world: the birth of capitalism, the age of revolution, imperialism, slavery, two world wars, and the building of the welfare state. He shows that through it all, societies have moved toward a more just distribution of income and assets, reducing racial and gender inequalities and offering greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. To keep moving, he argues, we need to commit to legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality, while resisting the temptations of cultural separatism. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better. But do we dare?

Thomas Piketty (French: [t??ma pik??ti]; born on 7 May 1971) is a French economist who works on wealth and income inequality. He is a professor (directeur d'?tudes) at the ?cole des hautes ?tudes en sciences sociales (EHESS), professor at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial professor at the London School of Economics new International Inequalities Institute. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasises the themes of his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future. He considers that to be a problem, and to address it, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Gobierno de Chile [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas Piketty

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