Equality E-Book

Thomas Piketty

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 119

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In this compelling dialogue, two of the world’s most influential thinkers reflect on the value of equality and debate what citizens and governments should do to narrow the gaps that separate us. Ranging across economics, philosophy, history, and current affairs, Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel consider how far we have come in achieving greater equality. At the same time, they confront head-on the extreme divides that remain in wealth, income, power, and status nationally and globally.

What can be done at a time of deep political instability and environmental crisis? Piketty and Sandel agree on much: more inclusive investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets. But how far and how fast can we push? Should we prioritize material or social change? What are the prospects for any change at all with nationalist forces resurgent? How should the left relate to values like patriotism and local solidarity where they collide with the challenges of mass migration and global climate change?

To see Piketty and Sandel grapple with these and other problems is to glimpse new possibilities for change and justice but also the stubborn truth that progress towards greater equality never comes quickly or without deep social conflict and political struggle.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Note on the text

1. Why worry about inequality?

2. Should money matter less?

3. The moral limits of markets

4. Globalization and populism

5. Meritocracy

6. Lotteries: Should they play a role in university admission and parliamentary selection?

7. Taxation, solidarity, and community

8. Borders, migration, and climate change

9. The future of the left: economics and identity

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Note on the text

Begin Reading

End User License Agreement

Pages

iii

iv

vi

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

Equality

What It Means and Why It Matters

Thomas Piketty

Michael J. Sandel

polity

Copyright © Thomas Piketty and Michael J. Sandel 2025

The right of Thomas Piketty and Michael J. Sandel to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2025 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6551-1

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024945532

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

Note on the text

This book is an edited version of a conversation between Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, held at the Paris School of Economics on May 20, 2024.

1Why worry about inequality?

Sandel:

Thomas, thank you for hosting us at the Paris School of Economics for this conversation about equality. One way of exploring what equality means is to begin by asking why inequality matters. Now, your research has revealed vividly to all of us just how stark are the inequalities of income and wealth. Let’s begin with these inequalities. You’ve shown that in Europe the richest 10% take in more than a third of the income and own more than half of the property. And in the United States, inequalities are even starker. Many of us find this troubling, but why exactly is it a problem?

Piketty:

I’m very glad that we have the opportunity for this discussion.

Let me first stress that I am optimistic about equality and inequality. I make this point in my latest book, A Brief History of Equality, where I stress that, even though there’s a lot of inequality today in Europe, in the US, in India, in Brazil – all over the world – in the long run there’s been a movement toward more equality. Where does this movement come from? And this will be a way to answer your question. This movement comes from social mobilization and a strong, enormous political demand for equality of rights in access to what people perceive to be fundamental goods, including education, health, the right to vote, and more generally to participate as fully as possible in various forms of social, cultural, economic, civic, and political life. In your own work you’ve stressed the role of self-government and participation. And I think this appetite for democratic participation and self-government is also what has been driving this movement toward more equality in the long run.

Now, it’s not been there forever, certainly not since prehistoric times. It starts in particular at the end of the eighteenth century with the French Revolution, the abolition of the privileges of the aristocracy, and with the American Revolution to some extent. And it continues in the nineteenth century with the abolition of slavery, the rise of labor movements, universal male suffrage, and then the rise of universal female suffrage. It continues in the twentieth century with the development of social security, progressive taxation, and decolonization, and it has continued even in recent decades. Sometimes we talk about the neoliberal era starting in the 1980s as an era of rising inequality. And it is true to some extent. But in some dimensions of inequality, including gender inequality, racial inequality, and North–South inequality to some extent, the long-run movement toward more equality has continued. And it’s going to continue in the future, in my view. Why? Because together with the rise of modernity, you have the rise of democratic awareness, an appetite for equal access to fundamental goods, to participation in all forms, to dignity in all forms. And this is really the driving force, including for the monetary dimensions of inequality.

To conclude with your specific question about income and wealth inequality, the numbers you mentioned about today’s high inequality levels are correct, but they were even worse 100 years ago. They were even worse 200 years ago. So there’s been progress in the long run. It’s never been easy. It has always involved enormous political battles and social mobilization. And it will continue like this. The good news is these are battles that can be won, and they have been won in the past. Studying these battles maybe is one of the best ways we have to prepare ourselves for the next steps.

Sandel:

You’ve just identified three reasons why inequality is a problem, as I hear you. One is about access to basic goods for everyone. The second is about political equality – voice, power, participation – and then you mentioned briefly a third: dignity. I’d like to see if we can isolate these three reasons why equality and inequality matter.

Let’s suppose, hypothetically, that we had the same inequalities of income and wealth we have today, but that we could somehow insulate the political process from those economic inequalities. So, let’s imagine that we could have public financing of campaigns with no private campaign contributions. Suppose we could regulate lobbying so that powerful companies and rich individuals could not have a disproportionate say in politics. Suppose we could somehow insulate political voice and participation from the effects of inequalities of income and wealth. And suppose we could address access to basic human goods – health, education, housing, food, transportation – through a more generous welfare state. So, we’re imagining we could address the first concern, access to basic goods, and the second concern, access to participation and political voice, but still leave intact inequalities of income and wealth. Would there still be a problem?

Piketty:

I think there would still be a problem, in particular for basic dignity and in the human relations and power relations that come with inequality. Monetary distance is more than just monetary distance. It comes with social distance. Of course, companies’ influence on politics and media is one of the most visible impacts of money on the public sphere. And it’s very hard to imagine how we could solve this problem with the kind of income and wealth scale that you have today. But even if we could, taking your thought experiment seriously, you would still have enormous inequality in purchasing power over the time of others. So, if by spending the equivalent of one hour of my income, I can buy your entire year of work, that implies kinds of social distance in human relations that raise very serious concerns and questions. So, the very formation of our ideals about democracy and self-government, which involves not only the formal organization of political campaigns and formal access to news, but also all these more informal relationships in our local community – social relations where people interact with each other, enter into deliberation with each other – is threatened by enormous monetary inequalities.

Finally, in my view, the most important political and philosophical argument is really a historical argument, which is that historically we’ve been able to address all of these concerns together. We’ve been able to reduce inequality enormously – not just access to basic goods and participation, but also monetary inequality in income and wealth. If you look at today, even with the rise of inequality in recent decades, the income gap in Europe between the top 10% or the top 1% and the bottom 50% or bottom 10% is enormously smaller than 100 years ago. This is less true in the US, but even in the US it is true as compared to 100 years ago.

So, we’ve moved toward more equality in the long run, and not only has this not been at the expense of prosperity or any other legitimate goals that we might want to balance with equality, but in fact this has been a key component of the rise of modern prosperity. Why? Because behind the enormous increase in prosperity that we’ve seen historically, the rise in a more inclusive and egalitarian socioeconomic system – in particular with more inclusive access to education – has been absolutely critical.

Now, there are two limits to that. One is that when we talk about access to basic goods, we have to keep in mind that the goods that we viewed as basic 100 years ago are not the same as today. So today a big issue is how you have a fair system of education, including at the level of higher education, an issue on which you have been writing and that we will talk about later. To keep it short for now, I think the fact that we’ve sort of given up on an ambitious egalitarian objective for higher education is at the source of many of our problems today – economic, and even more so democratic.

A second important caveat, which I want to stress right away, is the international and North–South dimension. So, a big part of the prosperity that we have in the North today, in Europe and in the US historically, has not only come through the rise of education and more inclusive investment in health and skills, which in a way is very positive – a win–win institutional transformation – but has also been made possible by the world division of labor. That’s in effect the exploitation of resources – natural resources and also human resources – sometimes in a very brutal manner, and also with the extra cost, of course, of threatening planetary sustainability, which we see more and more today. And this to me is clearly the main limitation of this positive movement toward more equality and more prosperity that I was referring to as the main challenge for the future. But it is also one of the reasons why, in the end, I still want to be optimistic, because I think the only way to address these new planetary challenges is to go even further in the direction of equality than we imagined in the past.

2Should money matter less?

Sandel:

Good. So, we’ve identified and already begun to discuss three aspects of equality: One is economic, a second is political, and a third is about social relations – about dignity, status, and respect. I’d like to come back to that third one shortly because it is in some ways the most challenging and maybe also the most intriguing. But I would like to go first to your proposals to deal with these three dimensions of inequality. The proposals begin with more progressive taxation, a fuller development of the welfare state, and inheritance taxes that can guarantee inheritance for all.

I’m sympathetic to all of these proposals. Some might say they amount to the kind of social democratic project that we already have, only a more robust version of it, aiming to realize it more fully. But then, reading your work, I notice a couple of potentially more radical proposals that might amount to a redefinition of the social democratic project beyond these more familiar proposals. One of them has to do with the transnational aspect, which is very interesting. But before we get to that, you write about a gradual decommodification of the economy and social life. And I’d like to ask you a question about decommodification in relation to redistribution, because the standard social democratic project is mainly about redistribution of income and wealth and therefore of political voice.