Not every economic or political attribute is restricted to economic implications alone. And not every aspect of inequality is something everyone needs to know. Therefore we now abandon the question-and-answer format that we have used so far. In this epilogue we take up a...
A half-century ago, the study of economic inequality was moribund in the United States. Indeed, in 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith noted in The Affluent Society that “few things are more evident in modern social history than the decline of interest in inequality...
When we move toward an analysis of inequalities in the wider world, we are required to cope with far more complex and uncertain data, and at the same time to seek simpler and more abstract theories. With some 220 extant countries, if each one...
“Wealth, as Mr. Hobbes says, is power.” Adam Smith wrote that, and I’ve already quoted it. It is the beginning and end of economic comments on the subject of wealth. And power.
We have only touched lightly on wealth so far in this volume,...
We shall now take it as a point of departure that actual economic inequalities in many countries, including the United States, are excessive and should be reduced. Not all readers will agree, and although this author holds a definite view, it has not been...
In his important book published in 2014, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has argued that, as a matter of fundamental tendency, capitalist systems produce rising inequalities in income and especially in wealth.1...
As you have probably noticed, economic inequality is a term covering a great many distinct ideas and concepts and measures. Here we will introduce the major terms that have operational meaning, because governments (and others) tend to collect data on them, and...
We in the United States are accustomed to the principle that “all men are created equal.” But of course that principle is not from time immemorial; it is not “self-evident” even now, and was far from being so, to most people, at the time...
In this short chapter, we take up another fairly technical topic: How can inequality be measured? We will not attempt to give a full technical treatment of this question, but will introduce the reader to some of the most commonly used concepts and techniques,...
The economies of almost all nation-states have experienced significant increases in economic inequality over the past generation, so that with almost no exceptions the world’s peoples belong to more unequal countries than they did in 1960 or even in 1980. Whether the same claim...
Causes of Changing Inequality in the World