Inequality.

Byline: Dr Kamal Monnoo

Thomas Piketty's latest book, Capital and Ideology, was launched in France and Central Europe last month and is already making a lot of waves in the conceptual thinking of managing economies and equitable growth and distribution. Though the English version officially does not come out till March 2020 (next year), I picked up my condensed English translated copy (original is 1,200 pages) in Prague in order to get a preview of what I now truly look forward to reading in detail next year. From what I have been able to read thus far, this new work from Piketty not only has a great deal of lessons for and relevance to economic governance in Pakistan, but also has the potential to become an even more politically influential work than the French economist's 2013 overview of in-equality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. As we know that this 2013's book made a huge impact and in fact in many ways soared up the left's agenda, ironically right in the heart of the developed western societies, especially the United States (US). Today, these issues that were raised by Thomas Piketty in 2013, are back to life and find themselves in the center of debate in the upcoming US elections, the current UK politics and the evolving social debate in Pakistan. Elizabeth Warren in the US has a realistic shot at becoming the most redistributionist President since Franklin D Roosevelt, in the UK a Jeremy Corbyn government could achieve similar things and here in Pakistan a party has been voted into government for the first time on the promise of equitable distribution.

In his new book, Piketty explains why this could be the moment for leaderships to finally turn to 'equality', and what policies they need to look at or adopt to make this happen. His premise is that inequality is a political choice. It is something societies opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalization. Whereas, Karl Marx saw history as a class struggle, Piketty sees it as a battle of ideologies. Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. That allows the rich to leisure in their comfortable houses while the homeless freeze outside. In his rather ambitious history of inequality from ancient India to today's US, Piketty recounts the justifications that recur throughout time: 'Rich people deserve their wealth'; 'It will trickle down'; 'They give it back through philanthropy'; Property is liberty'; 'The poor are underserving'...