A Brief History of Equality

Thomas Piketty

Apr 2022 · Harvard University Press · Narrated by Fred Sanders

About this audiobook

The world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding, a perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.

It is easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.

Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It’s a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship.

Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people.

We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.

Ratings and reviews

This was an amazing book. I really loved learning about the comparisons of equality before the French revolution and before the first world war. Those periods of history are ones I like and he opened up a new world of data on them with consequences and conclusions I'd not expected. After that he continued to capture my interest by talking about other topics like the abolishion of slavery in various countries, the way India has been trying to compensate for historical caste disadvantages and many other topics.

About the author

Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor at the LSE. His book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which argued that when the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, the resulting unequal distribution of wealth causes instability, has global sales so far of more than 2m copies.

Fred Sanders is a Yale graduate, originally from New York, whose acting credits include performances on Broadway (Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story) and national tours (Driving Miss Daisy and Big River). Since moving to LA in 1991, he has worked on TV (Seinfeld, The West Wing, Will & Grace) and film (The Shadow, Candyman) in addition to narrating over 150 audiobooks.