Book Tip No. 64 (2023): Thomas Piketty: A Short History of Equality.

3rd edition Munich 2022.

By Hans-Christian Riekhof

The book publications by Thema Piketty are characterized by two things: they are usually heavyweight works of several hundred pages full of (extremely exciting) statistics, and they mainly deal with the topic of unequal distribution of income and wealth. Therefore, it is initially surprising when Piketty presents a short history of equality.

Piketty takes the reader on a – indeed compressed – journey through important stages of history. Piketty describes a development that is surprisingly characterized by the fact that social inequalities have significantly decreased in the past centuries, an aspect that sometimes seems to get lost in historiography. This involves such fundamental issues as slavery, colonialism or the development of voters’ rights in democracy, but also the distribution effects of world wars and the discrimination of population groups through income or wealth distribution.

These are questions that urgently need social and political discussion. Piketty provides solid foundations for this. They should be given much more consideration in public debate. You don’t have to agree with all of Piketty’s derivations and recommendations. This is certainly the great weakness of the book: when Piketty leaves the area of scientific analysis and tells us what he imagines the world of tomorrow to be like. Here a clear separation of scientific analysis and personal evaluations would be desirable.