The big book on inequality. From our favourite French economist. 1,100+ pages, 49 hours of audiobook. And more graphs and confidence intervals than this little philosophy grad thought she could handle.

And three ideas that I can’t stop thinking about—
✨ the “Brahmin Left” aka why I’m the drama
✨ Piketty’s alternative the the left-right political spectrum
✨ how we solve inequality

💖 The “Brahmin Left”: Piketty dropped a bombshell in here—voting left (in every country) used to be correlated with the lowest levels of education. Now, voting left is correlated with the highest. Voting left also used to be correlated with reducing inequality (no matter which party was in power). Now it’s not. So I *am* the drama. Assuming you want to promote equality and improve the lives of the most marginalized, the data shows (and hoo boy there was data) that if you went to university and vote left, you’re the villain.

💖 Piketty’s alternative to the left-right political spectrum: quadrants. Specifically, a socialist (progressive taxation and equality) versus pro-rich (regressive taxation and trickle down economics) axis and an internationalist (pro-immigrant and intra-country federations) versus a nativist (anti-immigrant and My Country First) axis. It made so much sense that I’ve completely replaced my old left-right way of thinking with Piketty’s alternative.

And of course, our dude thinks the socialist internationalist quadrant is the best at tackling inequality. With an explanation more linked to taxation and fiscal dumping that I was personally used to hearing 😆

💖 And what gave me hope: we can honestly just… change things. The bulk of this book was a detailed exploration of “inequality regimes” in every country that had data on it (in Europe, North America, China, Japan, India, Brazil etc) going back as far as possible (like we’re talking Middle Ages). It was SUPER demystifying. And he concluded that:
⭐️ inequality persists because our social milieu (I refuse to use the word ideology here 😆) actively justifies it—and this social milieu is always in flux,
⭐️ inequality is maintained by very specific, unassuming, and easily changed legislation (about taxation, education access, property law, etc)

The book was hella long. And sometimes we were so deep in the data-trenches that I was just like, ‘Piketty, throw me a freaking bone here—where are we going with all this??’ (hence the 4⭐️ not 5⭐️)

Yet I appreciated a lot of the little things in here: how many non-Western sources there were; how much we talked bout slavery and colonialism; how varied the sources were (using literature like Jane Austen, for example); that we factored in things like racism, patriarchy, and climate change; and that I got clued into some super important information (like how much wealth is held by the top centile and how little wealth is held by governments—even how the US and the UK have NEGATIVE wealth 🤯).

This book was so chalked full of information that I borrowed it from the library 5 separate times and eventually just bought my own copy.