Brice Karickhoff's Reviews > A Brief History of Equality

I went into this book wanting to like it for some reason - I guess I liked the idea of it. And it actually started strong. But then, in my opinion, it got real bad.

It should not be titled “A brief history of equality”, but “A brief history of oppression” or something, because it was ultimately more about class struggle than anything, which! Is! fine!; class struggle is important and I’ve actually had a bit of a pro-labor streak in my thinking lately. Anyway, said history picked up around 1500, which I found odd given the fact that many societies were actually far more oppressive and less equal before this point. Eventually, I understood why the author would start at this point when he essentially stated that inequality and oppression are a byproduct of capitalism. I have two major problems with the arguments that ensued:

1. Inequality is actually one of the most natural things there is (as opposed to being a byproduct of capitalism). He states that it is “first of all a social, historical, and political construction.” I am not nearly the academic that the author is, but to me this seems to miss the mark. When I look at the spectrum of all life on earth over the course of the last 5 million years, it seems that equality is actually the recent social invention, inequality is not a “construction” at all, but the natural default. This may seem like I’m nit-picking, but the argument above is presented as an axiom in the prologue of the book, so the degree to which I disagree is a pretty big deal.

2. In all his analyses, the author focuses on gaps in wealth, or property ownership. I agree that these are important, and increasing, and should be mitigated to a degree. However, this unidimensional measure of inequality is really convenient if your goal is to attack capitalism. Of course capitalism led to disparities in wealth, because it basically gave birth to the idea that accumulation of wealth (as capital) was even really a thing (beyond some hereditary feudal system). So yes, society breaks down to those who are, in the truest sense, “capital”ists, and those who aren’t, and then if you measure equality based on how much capital individuals have accrued, disparities are wide. The author does not bother to mention the unprecedented-in-human-history explosion in living standards of the “bottom 50%” during this 500 year capitalist experiment. We might’ve lost equality (as measured by wealth accrued), but with it we lost about 95% of deaths by starvation, violence, and infectious disease, not to mention the fact that social mobility, while still limited, at least exists for basically the first time in history.

So all of the above thoughts developed in the first 30% of the book or so. I wanted to keep getting riled up, but slowly I began to realize what was really causing my frustration: the author just says things as if they are obvious and true, when they are actually quite bold and contentions. Three examples:

-“in the future, this kind of indicator could play a growing role in assessing the extent to which countries respect their commitments and in defining compensation mechanisms, as well as in developing systems of individual carbon cards, which will certainly be part of the indispensable institutional tools for meeting the climatic challenge”

-“It is time to understand that the logic of remedial justice and universalist justice are complementary and have to move forward in concert, one supporting the other.”

-“each country, each citizen on the planet, should have some part of the tax revenue derived from multinational companies and the worlds billionaires”

Do I disagree full-stop with the notion that carbon cards could be important, or remedial and universalist justice are complementary, or everyone should receive tax revenue from multinational operations? Not necessarily. But to just state it like that is another matter.

So, after reading the quotes above and a few others, I took a deep breath upon realizing what kind of book this was going to be, and just sat back and plowed through a classic 3-star “this is how we fix the world” sermon.