A decade ago this April, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English with Harvard University Press. It would sell more than two million copies and become one of the most iconic books of our young millennium. The year after its publication, the term “inequality” made its first appearance on the website of the World Economic Forum, and has not moved since. References to inequality have now become a routine, almost reflexive part of political commentary.
Whether Piketty was more cause or symptom seems less important than the question of what kind of politics accompanied this new language. We can see why by looking at the work of a fellow traveller in the surge of interest in inequality – the Serbian economist Branko Milanović, who published Global Inequality in 2016. This introduced his “elephant graph”, which showed the change in real income (on the y-axis) across the global income distribution (on the x-axis). The far left side of the chart – the rump of the elephant – showed next to no change for the poorest parts of the world. The hump of the elephant’s back showed a considerable increase in income for middle-income countries (primarily China and India), the dip of the elephant’s trunk showed the lack of wage gains for people in richer countries, and the steep upward sloping trunk marked the biggest winners in the top few per cent globally.
It is a charming image – a gift to everyone leading a seminar on the contemporary world economy. But what one does with it is not clear. In their book Six Faces of Globalization (2021), Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp use this example to show that one’s politics depends on which part of the elephant one comes into contact with. If you point at the rump, you can spark outrage at the persistence of global inequalities across the centuries. If a Chinese official points at the hump, say, that might spark patriotic enthusiasm. Conversely, for a European or American politician that same hump may be a sign that something needs to change – or alternatively, that China needs to be emulated. Pointing at the combination of stagnation and super-profits in the elephant’s ski-jump trunk gives ammunition to critics of plutocracy, and for more attention to be placed on the working class in rich countries.
Each of these observations comes with its own set of policy recommendations. Observing Chinese prosperity would mean more of the same for policymakers in China, yet energise their American and European counterparts to call for a new trade architecture. The plutocrats’ upward curve may support demands for higher taxation and greater redistribution. The rump of the elephant shows that something about the global hierarchy of production and profit needs to be overturned. The politics of worldwide inequality is a choose-your-own-adventure, a kaleidoscope of options that tells us more about where you are seeing the world from than a shared vision of what the world should look like.
What has the prophet of inequality himself had to say about the political conundrums produced by the concept he helped make ubiquitous? Like any honourable star he has spent much time protesting those who misunderstand the meaning of his celebrity. This was best illustrated by the popularity, in some circles, of reducing the 700 pages of Capital in the Twenty-First Century to the pithy formula of r>g – meaning the natural state of the world economy is the rate of return on capital exceeding that of growth, leading to more for those who have and relatively less for those who do not. Some saw Piketty naturalising inequality here, asserting the automatism inside the capitalist machine. Piketty has since rowed forcefully in the opposite direction of this charge. In volume after volume (Harvard University Press alone has published four since the original and three others have appeared at other presses, with a graphic novel forthcoming), he insists on the idea that inequality is not natural or machine-like, and that we should not understand the problem only through the tools of economics.
In Capital and Ideology (2020), he ransacked the work of historians and anthropologists to show that what he calls inequality regimes differ greatly according to place and century. There is no one way to understand what inequality is or what remedying it would look like. We must not give in to the supposedly iron law captured in his equation, he insists, becoming ever-more strident about his own democratic socialist politics and often seeming set on outflanking his critics from the left – one of the seven books from the past decade was called, simply, Time for Socialism.
What solutions does Piketty hope that his framing of inequality reveal? How do we shoot the elephant? One of the interesting things about his proposals is their emphasis on the idea of visibility. We need a global financial registry in which all company transactions can be easily seen, tracked, and thus taxed. Along with his collaborators at the World Inequality Lab, based at the Paris School of Economics where he teaches, Piketty has helped launch a kind of global archival treasure hunt, as post-doctoral students, professors and graduate students fan out to the four corners of the globe to dig up household surveys and data from often poorly maintained files and crumbling manila folders.
This idea is bracingly modern, recalling the nation-building period in the late 19th century when newly unified states such as Italy and Germany asked basic questions about their own population before they could decide how to provide for them – and draft them for war. Recall that operations as basic as censuses were only introduced just over a century ago. Dan Bouk’s recent book on the census – Democracy’s Data (2022) – shows the often volatile politics of counting, or what the French academic Alain Desrosières has called the “politics of large numbers”.
In France, more than in the US or UK, there has been a political trend called “statactivism”, which translates only weakly into English. The energy on the left of the Democratic and Labour parties in the past decade was much closer to that of the activist organisation Momentum and the idea of mobilisation than it was to measurement and the need for data. Perhaps part of the disconnect is that the Piketty model of socialism, however determined it is to have more egalitarian outcomes, is quite far from the romance of the working class let alone the tear gas and sublime experiences of the insurgent crowd. It is striking that a recent Verso book, Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello on The Populist Moment since 2008, only features the word inequality a couple of times. As Göran Therborn put it: inequality is only a background condition until it has a trigger.
It is difficult not to see the attraction of inequality for talking heads at Davos, the OECD and elsewhere, because it offers a problem that is open to technocratic solutions. This is the dream of politics without triggers. It is also a politics of inequality without its inverse, the strong claim of egalitarianism in the sense of Gracchus Babeuf’s call “to live and die equal just as we are born”. Part of this is about the limits of the demand. Writing in the 1990s, the Italian political scientist Norberto Bobbio could say without controversy that the primary goal of the left in the search for equality was the abolition of private property. Piketty can be coy about this goal, introducing provocative ideas of “temporary property” and other attempts to undermine what he calls “proprietarianism”.
The single most inflammatory thing the World Economic Forum ever published was an ill-advised graphic reading “you will own nothing, and you will be happy”. The slogan has since become the title of a bestselling book on the right. There is a way to talk about inequality without talking about decommodification, and the firewall between the two is important. A recent poll found that over three quarters of US Democrats think there is too much inequality in the US, but only 14 per cent said the system needs to be rebuilt.
Perhaps one reason why inequality is identified with a centrist position is because its politics are defined negatively. To be against inequality is not necessarily to be for one thing in particular. Rather, inequality is used more to identify what the wonks would call a policy area. Viewed positively, it opens a space for diverse claims, but it is also distant from the language of the people or the masses and their identification of a political agent of history.
The protagonists of inequality stories tend to be those drawing the graphs, crunching the numbers, and telling the tales – and selling the books. The leap into the streets always means transmuting the diagnosis into a new kind of solution.
After the paradoxical outcomes of the pandemic – when there was more talk about universal vulnerability than ever before, but the number of billionaires also rose by nearly a third – we are again in a fallow period, searching for a language of politics that does more than name a problem. One that offers an effective language of counter-hegemony.
For now, the target demographic for books on inequality remains what Piketty scathingly identified as the “Brahmin left” – highly educated people willing to consume critiques of the system while remaining too materially committed to risk its transformation. Meanwhile, for those closer to dwindling manufacturing bases in places like the US, the slogan on the T-shirt of the United Auto Workers head Shawn Fain might speak a language of antagonism less easily finessed into a statistical curve: “Eat the rich.”
[See also: Judith Butler and the fear of gender]
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