Thomas Piketty’s optimistic blueprint for easing global inequality

Thomas Piketty’s monumental “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2013) offered one of the most thorough and illuminating studies of capitalist economics since Karl Marx published the original “Capital” 150 years earlier. Despite the plainest of covers and roughly 700 pages of erudite and often dense analysis, Piketty’s “Capital” was a runaway hit — selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide. The book appeared at a crucial moment. Economic discontent had been brewing since the financial crash of 2008-2009; many blamed economic elites and their allies in government for having pushed the world’s banking system (and the welfare of tens of millions) into an abyss. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street provided this anger with a focus and a movement, facilitated the emergence of political leaders such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and generated a hunger for understanding the mechanisms of capitalism capable of producing deep economic inequality and injustice. Piketty’s tome provided the insight into capitalism’s inner workings that many were so urgently seeking.

“Capital in the TwentyFirst Century” focused most of its attention on the advanced industrialized world of Western Europe and the United States. Piketty’s even longer sequel, “Capital and Ideology” (2019), deepened that original analysis while expanding its scope to include much of the rest of the world, with a focus in particular on how slavery and colonialism abetted the triumph of the capitalist West. Piketty’s latest work, “A Brief History of Equality,” neatly summarizes the findings of his two original volumes in a “mere” 250 pages of text. Readers will find this work attractive for its brevity alone. But “A Brief History of Equality” is also a very different kind of book from the first two.

While not quite a manifesto, “A Brief History of Equality” offers a sustained argument for why we should be optimistic about human progress, which Piketty defines as “the movement toward equality.” Across the last 200 years, he notes, life expectancy has increased from 26 to 72 years. “At present,” he adds, “humanity is in better health than it has ever been; it also has more access to education and culture than ever before.” Piketty is acutely aware of the disparities in the welfare of individuals both within advanced industrial societies and between the Global North and the Global South. But his reading of the history of the 20th century allows him to think that these 21st-century inequalities can be narrowed, in part because “the march toward equality in all its forms” is irrepressible and in part because past generations of reformers lit a path that still illuminates the way forward.

Piketty focuses in particular on the revolution in government that liberal and left forces in the industrialized West propelled between 1910 and 1980. Across these decades, he writes, Western societies built robust welfare states, invested heavily in education and other public goods, and considerably narrowed economic inequality — and thus the gap in life chances — between rich and poor.