Stone Centre Online Inequality Dialogue: Three key takeaways
The inaugural Stone Centre Online Dialogue on Inequality in the History of Economic and Political Thought, brought together a distinguished panel to explore the historical study of inequality.
Chaired by The New Yorker's John Cassidy, the event featured authors Branko Milanović (Visions of Inequality) and David Lay Williams (The Greatest of All Plagues), alongside discussants Beatrice Cherrier (CNRS) and Anna Stansbury (MIT Sloan). The discussion centred on the tension between philosophical and economic approaches to inequality, and the shift from historical concerns to modern data-driven analysis.
The discussion covered a lot of ground and we encourage anyone who couldn’t join to stream the full event.
Below, we pick out three key takeaways to provide a flavour of the discussion.
Inequality is now a data-driven public story, framed by two key trends
The dialogue underscored that inequality's prominence today stems from the advent of robust, large-scale empirical data, transforming it from a niche topic into something economics students regularly cite as the most important issue for economists today. This shift was defined by two major trends:
Global distribution: Branko’s "Elephant Curve" vividly illustrates the winners and losers from global growth during the rapid globalisation from the 1980s. The winners were those in the middle of the global income distribution (a global middle class) and those at the top. The losers were the bottom 10%, who experienced virtually no growth, and the working and middle classes in high income countries.
Top-end concentration: Research by Piketty, Saez, and Atkinson documented the historical U-curve of domestic income concentration, showing that top incomes have surged since the 1980s.
The history of inequality is marked by the tension between philosophy and economics
Discussion of the books by Branko and David highlighted a fundamental tension in how inequality has been understood historically. David’s view, informed by Plato and Rousseau, sees distributive justice as a contingent matter rooted in human agency and moral choice. Thinkers like Rousseau viewed inequality as a societal poison.
Although economists in the 20th century (Pigou, Kuznets, Kaldor, Hicks) steered the discipline away from the question of how wealth was acquired, Beatrice highlighted the normative dimension of Branko’s book and the ‘class’ lens he uses to evaluate historical writing about inequality.
There was a lively discussion about why inequality disappears from economics in the middle of the last century. In an interesting exchange touching on morality, data and theory, Branko suggested different reasons why the ‘eclipse’ occurred during the cold war in the West and in the Socialist states. The end of communism and the great recession ended the eclipse and put inequality back into economics.
Branko and David had contrasting views of Karl Marx. David viewed Marx as an egalitarian philosopher, whereas Branko saw him as a practical anti-capitalist, whose primary goal was the abolition of the system and who viewed incremental reduction of inequality as a "petty bourgeois dream."
Studying inequality requires context, data diversity, and new frameworks
Anna argued that historical critiques of inequality largely occurred in a zero-sum world assuming no growth, where the accumulation of wealth by some was predicated on the deprivation of others. A world of rising output per capita means that income inequality is no longer necessarily predicated on the poverty of others. This changes the moral and political justification for intervention.
Beatrice and Branko highlighted the difficulty of historical research due to limited availability of data and the evolving definition of key terms like 'household' or 'income' across different time periods and countries.
Concluding the event, Wendy Carlin emphasised the need for new educational tools and diversity in the field, noting CORE Econ’s efforts in this area. Wendy referred to CORE Econ’s Global Inequality Skyscraper, designed to provide a vivid illustration of how inequality evolved within and between countries across the world since the 1980s, as a useful tool for engaging the next generation of economists with the study of inequality.
Useful links
An introduction to our panellists
CORE Econ Inequality Skyscraper
John Cassidy: Capitalism and Its Critics
Authors
Stone Centre at UCL
Stone Centre at UCL.