Publishers Weekly
10/02/2023
CUNY economist Milanovic (A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality) profiles prominent economists in this sweeping survey of more than 200 years of philosophical thought about inequality. He begins with the 18th-century French economist Francois Quesnay, who sought to prove that “the social structure of the ideal society” was a “rich, and perhaps stationary, agricultural kingdom.” But this “static, one-shot picture of the class structure” failed to predict how classes would further stratify with industrial development. Adam Smith adopted a model in which economic development proceeded along increasingly complex stages, leading to the inevitable creation of inequality. David Ricardo, writing in late-18th-century England, “defined more sharply than anybody before him the three principal social classes” (landowners, renters, and capitalists). Karl Marx focused on how economic mechanisms, such as capitalism’s system of value extraction through wage labor, generate the immiseration of the lower classes. Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto, a contemporary of Marx, was “a conservative with antireligious feelings” and, Milanovic contends, the first to speculate that income inequality varies over time as social institutions change. Though Milanovic peppers in amusing tidbits, from Pareto’s dozens of cats to the likelihood that Ricardo was twice as rich as Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, it’s still a dense and scholarly account. This will appeal primarily to readers with a background in economic theory and analysis. (Oct.)
Anton Jäger
What do we talk about when we talk about economic inequality? To those who came of age after the 2008 financial crisis and Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century—an era marked by a widening fracture between rich and poor, especially within Western nations—the question might seem obvious. But as Branko Milanovic shows in his indispensable chronicle of the concept, we underestimate just how young, limited, and fraught our current understanding of inequality is—and how diverse its range of forebears. Researched with forensic thoroughness, and hardly shy about its political implications, Visions of Inequality presents a rare and rewarding combination of economic and conceptual history.
Finance & Development - Zia Qureshi
An absorbing account of how thinking about inequality has evolved…Milanovic mixes his methodical examination of the evolution of economic thought about inequality with fascinating portraits of great economists and the society and polity of their times.
Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan
A work of art in today’s economics. With equal intensity, the book traverses contemporary ideological, political, and social divides and implores theoretical and empirical economists to critically assess their intellectual positions…an essential and insightful analysis of the history of economic inequality urgently relevant today…a groundbreaking work, bound to influence the economics profession and our worldview.
Enlightened Economist - Diane Coyle
For anybody interested in inequality—and we all should be—anything by Milanovic is an essential read…This book is a great scene setter for the modern debate, not least in illustrating the link between ideas of inequality and the times in which ideas are formed.
New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
A history of the changing ways economists have broached the subject [of inequality] since the French Revolution…[Milanovic] describes how Western economists were in thrall to an unholy combination of extremely simplistic assumptions and extremely complex mathematical models.
Financial Times - Tej Parikh
An in-depth contextual analysis of how economic minds from Adam Smith to Karl Marx have shaped our understanding of class, income and wealth…This is a vital reference for the economic and philosophical theories underpinning our understanding of inequality today.
Prospect Magazine - Tom Clark
'To remind us of the half-forgotten ways in which class can be integrated into the big economic picture, Milanovic takes us on a guided tour of six minds, spanning 200 years. The chapters blend tight analysis of how each thinker understood the forces reshaping inequality in their day with gobbets of gossip…[The author’s] judgments…are arrestingly fresh.
Financial Times - Martin Wolf
Inequality is back, as a political topic and as a focus of study. In this fascinating book, Milanovic, one of the world’s most influential scholars of inequality, examines what leading economists of the past have had to say on this issue.
Daniel Zamora
By…exploring the different ways inequality has been conceptualized, [Milanovic] prompts us to consider the political ramifications of our restricted focus on inter-individual distribution.
Dissent - Simon Torracinta
Steps back to question the study of inequality itself. Where does this work come from? Was inequality always so central a preoccupation for economists — or in politics at large? Ultimately, the book reveals the limits of a purely economic framing of these questions…a breezy tour d’horizon of economic conceptions of inequality since the Enlightenment.
Angus Deaton
Fascinating and often surprising, offering new insight into iconic figures like Smith and Marx and unexpected perspectives on their work. Branko Milanovic shows that the writings of centuries past have much to teach us about inequality, especially about class and power. A truly important book.
Ingrid Bleynat
A fascinating journey across the history of economic thought through the lens of inequality. Milanovic’s erudite and thought-provoking exploration casts new light both on the analysis of income concentration and on the ideological travails of economics as a discipline.
Les Echoes - Julien Damon
A captivating journey through the time of ideas, with an impact on current events.
Literary Review - Darrin M. McMahon
A timely book that brings the weight of the past to bear on one of the most pressing issues of our time…Milanovic is a clear and direct writer, unafraid of making strong judgements and with an idiosyncratic eye for detail. That makes for original, and sometimes amusingly wry, revelations.
Mark Blyth
Imagine being able to ask Smith, Marx, and Pareto round for dinner and a chat about how each of them sees inequality. In effect, that’s what Branko Milanovic does in this new book. As he shows, economists’ interest in the subject is by no means a new phenomenon—but what counts, and who counts, in any analysis of inequality has varied dramatically over time. Recognizing this fact should make us reflect on how our own contemporary assays of inequality are more limited than we think. Taking us on an eye-opening tour from Quesnay to Kuznets, Milanovic shows us how inequality and capitalism have always intertwined.
Library Journal
10/06/2023
Milanovic (Stone Ctr. on Socio-Economic Inequality, City Univ. of New York; Capitalism, Alone) is the former lead economist of the World Bank's research department. His book's objective is to trace the evolution—from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War—of economic viewpoints on inequality, which he says is linked to time and place. To show readers this, the book probes the work of six key figures. François Quesnay, a leading economist in France, where estate owners controlled the land and every person and thing on it, believed that this was an acceptable way of life for all. European economists—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and others—seemed to accept that the wants and pleasures of landowners and capitalists allowed for, even necessitated, that other people existed to serve their needs. Italian Vilfredo Pareto deduced that it was only natural that the rich became richer, while the lives of those with lower incomes deteriorated. In the latter part of the 20th century, differing opinions regarding the right to wealth emerged with Simon Kuznets and others who popularized the idea that there is a need for a more equitable society. VERDICT A technical book best suited for readers with strong economic backgrounds, but it may interest general readers as well.—Claude Ury
Kirkus Reviews
2023-07-14
A noted economist examines the thinking of six of his predecessors on how income is distributed and the conditions that favor or hinder the accumulation of wealth.
Although he figures in these pages, which require a solid background in economics, Thomas Piketty was not the first economist to think about inequality. He may have been the timeliest, however, given the spectacular rise of that inequality, which, by some economic theories, shouldn’t be happening. By Piketty’s own theorizing we might well see an economy in which the top earners capture so much income that “it threatens to swallow the entire output of the society.” Economists who preceded him formulated the problem in different ways, conditioned by their time. François Quesnay, who ranks among the first economists to deserve the name, lived in a time when French society was divided into “estates,” classes assumed to be more or less static, in which “all workers are assumed to be poorer than all capitalists, and all capitalists to be poorer than all landlords.” A small problem lies in this formulation, with Adam Smith and then David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Vilfredo Pareto puzzling out what happens when class eventually gives way to individuals and the rise of individual elites. Milanovic’s final case study concerns Simon Kuznets, who discounted inequality in a time when it was far less pronounced than earlier (and today) and when class distinctions were suppressed in the anti-Marxist narrative of the Cold War. No matter how problematic their theories, each of these economists contributed to an evolving view of inequality: Marx, for example, by understanding that inequality is relative (“Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society”), and Pareto by understanding that whatever the social structure, “the underlying distribution of wealth and income could not be affected”—or, in other words, that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
A dense, numerically knotty, bracing companion to contemporary economic thinkers on the problem of inequality.
