Visions of Inequality

From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
Branko Milanovic charts 200 years of the fascinating history of the discourse on inequality through portraits of six key economists, from Quesnay to Kuznets. In their work and lives, we see how differently each conceived of inequality, and how the subject, prominent in their times, was eclipsed during the Cold War and has become central once again.

A Financial Times Best Economics Book of the Year

“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.” —LSE Review of Books

“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.” —New York Times

“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.” —Literary Review

“How do you see income distribution in your time, and how and why do you expect it to change?” Branko Milanovic imagines posing this question to six of history’s most influential economists. Probing the works of these key thinkers in the context of their lives, Milanovic charts the evolution of the concept of inequality across the centuries. We cannot speak of inequality in general, he argues: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place.

Visions of Inequality takes us from François Quesnay, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category determined by one’s relation to the means of production. Later, Vilfredo Pareto reconceived class in terms of elites versus the rest, while Simon Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. Milanovic further explores why inequality receded from scholarship during the Cold War, before gaining renewed attention in economics today.

An invaluable intellectual genealogy, Visions of Inequality brings nuanced insight to a hotly contested idea.

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