Equality. What It Means and Why It Matters By Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, Polity, 2025. 119pp.
‘‘Why should a hedge fund manager make 5,000 times more than a teacher or nurse, or for that matter a physician?’ (Michael Sandel)
This short book is the record of a public discussion between two well-known ‘left’ academics. Social and economic historian Piketty is author of the much discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century (see review in this journal), while Sandel is a prominent ‘public intellectual’, who has written books on what may broadly be called political philosophy. The book is divided into a number of chapters with titles such as ‘Why Worry About Inequality?’, ‘Should Money Matter Less?’, ‘The Moral Limits of Markets’, ‘Globalization and Populism’, ‘Meritocracy’, ‘Borders, Migration and Social Change’ and ‘The Future of the Left: Economics and Identity’.
Though presented as a kind of debate, both participants tend to agree on most things. In particular, they both seem convinced that the current social and economic system, capitalism, can be reformed in such a way as to make things significantly more ‘equal’ than they are at present. Piketty points to how, over the history of capitalism, vast swathes of people have seen their conditions of life greatly improve. And we can agree: even in the nineteenth century, in the system’s relatively early stages, this is something which Marx, for all his insistence on capitalism’s inevitable inequalities, observed as an ongoing reality. In this connection Piketty mentions, for example, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, decolonisation, increasing gender and racial equality, the welfare state, and higher living standards for many.
The way forward from this, according to both discussants, is even greater equality. They do not view this as lying in the ‘neoliberal’ turn capitalism has taken since the 1980s which has seen an increased proportion of total wealth owned and controlled by the richest, but in governments levying swingeing taxation rises on the wealthiest (‘80-90% on income and profits’) and being more active in implementing ‘a fuller development of the welfare state’. This, rather than ‘uncritically embracing the market faith’ as they see recent Western governments as having done, will assure a more equal (or at least less unequal) distribution of wealth and give more people access to the goods and services which will allow them to have comfortable living standards. The aim, Piketty argues, should be an economy that is ‘99% decommodified’, by which he means extensive government ownership and control of the means of living, and one which, Sandel asserts, will also lead to ’greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity and respect’.
It would be churlish not to acknowledge the well-meaning nature of the two commentators’ wish lists, their support, for example, for ‘more investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets’ (Sandel). Unfortunately, however, these do not stand up to close scrutiny. While capitalism, with its ‘growth at all costs’ compulsion, may continue to improve living standards for many on the planet overall, governments simply cannot create anything resembling equality among those who live under that system, since their prime purpose is to manage it in the overall interest of the minority who monopolise the wealth. Different governments may of course have different approaches to this, in the degree of central control they exercise, for example, but, so long as the overall framework of money, wages and salaries, and buying and selling exists, they will always – and inevitably – find themselves trying to keep afloat a system founded on producing goods and services for a profit.
At one point, one of the discussants (Piketty), who claims to stand for ‘democratic, federalist, and internationalist socialism’, seems to come close to suggesting the society of free access that socialists advocate. He talks about a situation in which ‘99% of goods and services, like education and health, are freely accessible’ and ‘you only have 1% left commodified’, advocating ‘a system outside monetary logic and the profit logic’. Yet he comes out the other end still failing to see beyond a monetary economy, and in the end it becomes clear that what he is hoping for is a form of capitalism with a less unequal distribution of wealth and income and a more extensive welfare state (or ‘social state’, as he calls it) than exists at present. It also becomes clear, in the end, that the discussion between the two figures is one about old-fashioned reformism, about the extent to which it is possible for capitalism to ‘narrow’ the pay gap between one worker and another and the wealth gap between workers and capitalists. It is not about achieving the absolute economic equality that will characterise a society of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – the society of the future that we call socialism.
Howard Moss
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