The world\'s leading economist of inEquality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic History of human progress toward Equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding.
The future is up to us..
The past shows us how.
We know we can do better, Piketty concludes.
At stake is the quality of life for billions of people.
At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization.
To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make Equality a lasting reality.
Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice.
But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship.
It\'s a History of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster.
Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.
Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state.
Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of History gives us reasons to be optimistic.
No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty.
We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations.
A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.
It\'s easy to be pessimistic about inequality.
The world\'s leading economist of inEquality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic History of human progress toward Equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding
