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.
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