Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War

CUNY economist Milanovic (A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality) profiles prominent economists in this sweeping survey of more than 200 years of philosophical thought about inequality. He begins with the 18th-century French economist Francois Quesnay, who sought to prove that “the social structure of the ideal society” was a “rich, and perhaps stationary, agricultural kingdom.” But this “static, one-shot picture of the class structure” failed to predict how classes would further stratify with industrial development. Adam Smith adopted a model in which economic development proceeded along increasingly complex stages, leading to the inevitable creation of inequality. David Ricardo, writing in late-18th-century England, “defined more sharply than anybody before him the three principal social classes” (landowners, renters, and capitalists). Karl Marx focused on how economic mechanisms, such as capitalism’s system of value extraction through wage labor, generate the immiseration of the lower classes. Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto, a contemporary of Marx, was “a conservative with antireligious feelings” and, Milanovic contends, the first to speculate that income inequality varies over time as social institutions change. Though Milanovic peppers in amusing tidbits, from Pareto’s dozens of cats to the likelihood that Ricardo was twice as rich as Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, it’s still a dense and scholarly account. This will appeal primarily to readers with a background in economic theory and analysis. (Oct.)