A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty. Thomas is a French economist and Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics. In addition, he is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.
Thomas previously taught as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a French economist, Thomas documents a global progress regarding equality by tapping into historical data.
This book is certainly addressing wealth redistribution, and is a continuation from his books Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020).
However, the most interesting discoveries for Americans is how Thomas addresses colonialism. This obviously brings America’s slavery into a world view within Chapter 3: The Heritage of Slavery and Colonialism. In fact, we see that Europeans began their colonial rule around 1450–1500 with Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. This was the initial Portuguese trading post on the coast of Africa. Thomas includes Columbus’s expedition to America. However this all ended in the 1960s with the French defeats in Indochina (Vietnam) and Northern Africa (Algeria). Yet, Thomas certainly brings South African apartheid into focus as these are not so long ago transformations.
How it Started
Thomas documents the deep historical inequality that certainly reveals how France and England created laws and international treaties that structured their imperialist goals across the globe:
The British also made use of protectionist measures in the naval industry, which had flourished in India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by instituting in 1715 a special tax of 15 percent on all goods imported on ships made in India, and then by decreeing that only British vessels could import to the United Kingdom merchandise coming from east of the Cape of Good Hope. Even if it is difficult to propose an overall estimate, it seems clear that the whole of these protectionist measures, imposed on the rest of the world by the threat of an attack by British gunboats, played a significant role in British and European industrial domination. According to available estimates, China’s and India’s share in worldwide manufacturing, which was still 53 percent in 1800, was no more than 5 percent in 1900.
pgs. 58-59
For both France and England used their tools of war: armies and powerful naval fleets to exploit countries around the globe. As certainly astounding as it is read today, the French ruling class stacked tax deductions for political contributions in their favor, actually forcing the poorest French citizens to pay those taxes.
In France, a wealthy voter giving 7,500 euros (the current ceiling) to his preferred political party has a right to a tax deduction of 5,000 euros, financed by the rest of the taxpayers.
pg. 109
A Religious House of Cards
While Thomas certainly is documenting the slow movement to equality, the hard lessons from France’s religious past actually strengthens the call for a more rapid speed of change:
It is, however, completely possible that new research or previously unknown sources will make it possible to further develop this conclusion, now fragile and provisional. Many other factors might explain an earlier protocapitalist divergence.
For example, the medievalist Giacomo Todeschini proposes that the Catholic Church developed a particularly sophisticated system of financial, commercial, and property law in Europe in order to ensure its permanence as a simultaneously religious, political, and property-owning organization, even though the clergy’s celibacy forbade it to exist as a class.
pg. 64
Paris and Vatican City versus all
Realize that even the French catholic church authored deeply strategic systems. These carefully scripted laws exploited financial and political power. At the expense of every other religion, the game was so obviously stacked.
Places of worship are not officially subsidized, except when they were built before the law of 1905 separated church and state in France. In practice, this law concerns almost exclusively Christian churches and puts Muslim believers at a disadvantage in relation to Christians. Catholic elementary schools, middle schools, and lycées that were already established at the time the Debré law was approved (1959) continue to be massively financed by the taxpayers, in proportions found in almost no other country.
These institutions have also retained the right to choose their pupils freely, without respecting any common rule in terms of social diversity, so that they make a powerful contribution to educational ghettoization. Concerning the financing of religions (clergy and buildings), we must add the central role played by fiscal subsidies.
In France, as in many countries, donations to religions entitle the giver to tax deductions that constitute, de facto, a mode of extremely inegalitarian public financing, because the public subsidy increases along with the proportion of the donation (in practice, this favors certain new religions with respect to others).
pg. 201
Is injustice coming to an end?
So, Thomas is showing how data permits countries to learn from and commit to a new system that works for all citizens of all ethnicities and incomes across all institutions: legal, financial and educational systems. This will finally permit equality a true reality.
In conclusion, Thomas is also describing why he is optimistic about the future. France, Europe, and America have certainly held a history of violence and social struggle. However Thomas believes mankind has progressed to a more equal distribution of wealth, race, and access to education, healthcare and full citizenship rights.
This is an absolutely amazing book to begin 2023, yet try as I will, Thomas’ work will be difficult to top.
- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-book-explores-how-economic-inequality-is-perpetuated/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/books/review/a-brief-history-of-equality-thomas-piketty.html
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/06/17/thomas-pikettys-optimistic-blueprint-easing-global-inequality/
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-equality-thomas-piketty-book-review-flattening-the-wealth-curve-11649429391
- https://www.worldbank.org/en/events/2021/01/18/brief-history-of-equality