Notes

5 W Main: Visions of Inequality. For most of the Cold War, economists—not just in the West but in the Soviet Bloc, too—spent little time researching income inequality. The Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson’s influential textbook Economics spans some 900 plus pages, but it dedicates only two pages to the subject. Another Nobel laureate, Robert Lucas, formerly the president of the American Economic Association, said that “of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, … the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.” And it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Journal of Economic Literature, the foremost classification system of economic papers and books, introduced a code for economic inequality.

But in recent years, as Branko Milanovic writes in Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War, inequality studies have “exploded.” Perhaps most famously, the 2014 English translation of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century probably sold more copies in its first year than any other economics book ever. And it’s not just the study of income inequality that’s gained traction; the politics of it has gained traction also. Inequality has become the watchword of left-populist movements, like Jeremy Corbyn’s in the United Kingdom or Bernie Sanders’s in the United States. Why? This week, in the member’s dispatch, we take a look—at the question and Milanovic’s ambitious crack at answering it.

—Gustav Jönsson