This is a long review essay of one of the most important books published in the last few years. Print it out, make a cup of tea, turn off your phone and mull over what you really think about inequality today.
I
At the time of writing, Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty, a young and heretofore largely unknown economics professor, has been translated into 31 languages and sold over 1.5 million copies. Capital, as it will hereafter be referred to, is a 685 page book on macro-economics, replete with 18 tables, 97 graphs, and 687 detailed footnotes, written originally in French and published by the respected academic publisher Belknap/ Harvard. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban it isn’t.
These figures invite the obvious question: why? After all, it’s not as if the topic on which Piketty focuses – wealth, income and inequality – has been ignored by other economists. Better known writers like Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Anthony Atkinson have all written extensively and eloquently on the topic.
Some have suggested that Piketty’s success is down to his unprecedented rigour and admirable breadth. J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at Berkeley has observed that the book “combines history, quantitative estimation, social science theory, and a deep concern with societal welfare” – he might have added literature, as Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac play frequent walk on parts – “in a way that is too rare these days.” This is true but, as he goes on to remark, that would normally make it “a book for a narrow audience: me and a few others. I expected people who did not have the souls of accountants to start to snore at Piketty’s numbers, numbers, numbers and more numbers.”
A more persuasive reason is surely not just that the book is thorough and the moment is right but that the argument was what people wanted to hear. According to Stephanie Kelton, Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, “it was Piketty whose meticulous examination of the evidence, seemed to provide the impartial proof audiences were craving. The left was right.” Or, more pointedly still, in the words of Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, Capital “appears to strengthen the case for redistribution… if you are an activist who favours lots of redistribution, the Piketty story is a lot easier to tell yourself and to tell your audiences”.
I want to argue that for all that Piketty’s admirably thorough and persuasive data collection and analysis does show the left to be right – inequality is growing and market forces alone will not reverse that, largely because they cause it – the book is anything but comforting to those who seek to implement the redistributist policies of the left. It may reveal the depth of the social democratic wound, but it offers little hope of it being healed.
II
For a book of such length and depth, Capital can be summarised with incomparable brevity: r>g. Put slightly less gnomically, this means the average annual rate of return on capital, including profits, dividends and other income from capital (expressed as a percentage of its total value) is greater than the rate of growth of the economy (i.e. the annual increase output). Or, in the discomforting words of the gospel, to which we shall return, “whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance, but whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”
One of Capital’s great strengths is the masses of data on which it draws. Piketty’s best sources are France and Britain, but he also looks at the US, Germany and to a lesser extent Japan, Italy, and Spain. In addition, anecdotally but to great effect, he draws on literature, particularly from the early 19th century, to depict a world in which wealth was stable (largely free from the ravages of inflation), significantly more important than income, and highly concentrated in the hands of rentiers, those who made a living from income from property or investments, and nobility, who, between them, were all but a different species from the rest of the people. If the literature helps Piketty depicts this world, the data allow him to show how the arc of the universe is bending slowly back towards it.
Piketty distinguishes between three different kinds of inequality – inequality of income from labour, inequality in the ownership of capital and the income to which it gives rise, and inequality based on the interaction between these two – and this enables him to go beyond better known measures, such as the Gini coefficient, which unhelpfully elides these distinct factors, and to analyse the problem in forensic detail.
Inequality with respect to capital, he shows, is always greater than inequality with respect to income. The top centile (1 per cent’s) share of capital was about 55 per cent in France at beginning of 19th century, rising to 60 per cent in 1880-90 and to an astonishing 70 per cent on eve of the Great War. Capital inequality was just as bad in Britain, with the top centile’s share hovering between 55 per cent and 60 per cent over 1810-1870 and rising to 70 per cent in 1910 (at which time the top decile’s (i.e. 10 per cent’s) capital share was an eye-watering 90 per cent).
Virtually everywhere, the period of 1870-1914 shows a stabilisation of extreme capital inequality, with data from every country for which data exist, including that one-day Social Democratic paradise, Sweden, showing the richest 10 per cent of the population owning somewhere between half and virtually everything in the country. This, as Piketty notes, was the first great era of trading and financial globalisation, with modern diversified capital markets, with individuals holding complex portfolios of domestic and foreign, public and private assets, all operating in a culture of unprecedented technological innovation. That may sound familiar.
Everything changed, or at least began to, in the second decade of the 20th century. Up until then, the total national value of capital in Britain and France was around six or seven times the national income. In other words, the nation owned six times more than it earned per annum and it was therefore far easier to live well off capital than it was by working for a living. By 1950, this had fallen to two or three times. The decades between 1914 and 1945 effectively eviscerated capital and they cast a brilliant shadow of reduced inequality that was at least as long as themselves.
This was Les Trente Glorieuses, as they are known in France, the “Glorious Thirty” years after the war in which many Western countries experienced the happy combination of significant economic growth without exacerbating the (historically very low) levels of capital and income inequality with which they started. “For the first time in history,” he writes, “one could live better by obtaining a job in the top centile rather than an inheritance in the top centile: study, work, and talent paid better than inheritance.” More remarkably still, growth and relative equality was combined with the rapid expansion of government activity. The combination seemed natural and right. As Piketty observes, “when incomes are increasing 5 per cent a year, it is not too difficult to get people to agree to devote an increasing share of that growth to social spending.” Economists and politicians came to assume that this combination of economic growth, increased public spending and low and stable levels of inequality was the natural and inevitable direction of travel for modern societies. It wasn’t.
The last decades of the twentieth century saw developed nations return slowly to the status quo ante. Growth slowed, government spending faltered, and inequality grew. By 2010, the capital/ income ratio had returned close to nineteenth century levels. Piketty shows how despite the fact that the asset structure of the 21st century has very little in common with Jane Austen’s time – agricultural land has long since been replaced by buildings, business capital and financial capital as the source of wealth – the overall levels and proportions are remarkably similar. In particular, the total value of private wealth, which stood at between two and three years of national income for rich countries between 1950 and 1970, had reached between four and seven times in 2010 – a remarkably strong and rapid comeback of private capital “or, to put it another way, the [re]emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism.”
This naturally feeds the leftist narrative that it was the evil of Thatcherism and Reaganomics that tore up the elysian fields of social democracy that had spread through the Western world in the post-war decades. But this is not entirely right. Piketty credits the politics of the last quarter of the 20th century with much, including “the gradual privatization and transfer of public wealth into private hands” and the determined financialisation of the global economy, allowing for the total amount of financial assets and liabilities held by various sectors (including households) to increased more rapidly (in some instances considerably more rapidly) than net wealth.
But he is also clear that while Les Trente Glorieuses did witness significant growth, longer term data show these were anomalous decades, years in which countries were effectively playing catch up after the destruction of the less than glorious thirty years that preceded them. A similar logic of catch up is dictating the rapid growth of China and India in our own time. When there is no catching up to be done, growth is naturally much lower, which means public spending becomes more difficult. As he says with some finality, “there is no historical example of a country at the world technological frontier whose growth in per capita output exceeded 1.5 percent over a lengthy period of time.” In other words, Les Trente Glorieuses would not have remained glorious even without Thatcher and Reagan.
The inequality at the end of the twentieth century was not identical to that at its start. More specifically, the emergence of what Piketty calls a “patrimonial middle class” in the post-war period, with its own wealth, prevented a return to capital inequality levels of 1900. “We have moved from a society with a small number of very wealthy rentiers to one with a much larger number of less wealthy rentiers: a society of petits rentiers if you will.” Moreover, taxation levels are, of course, very significantly higher than they were a century ago. The result is that “today one has to climb much higher in the social hierarchy before income from capital outweighs income from labour.”
In addition, income inequality has become a pressing issue. The world, or at least the Anglo-Saxon world, has seen the rise of “supersalaries” in certain sectors. The vast majority of top 0.1 per cent of income hierarchy in 2000-2010 in the US consists of top managers (by comparison athletes, actors, artists, etc. make up five per cent). As an aside, Piketty carefully but thoroughly skewers the myth that such people are worth what they are paid (cf. page 335 for those who are interested in this important ‘debate’). “If executive pay were determined by marginal productivity,” as it is so often justified as being, he explains, “one would expect its variance to have little to do with external variances and to depend solely or primarily on non-external variances. In fact, we observe just the opposite: it is when sales and profits increase for external reasons that executive pay rises most rapidly.” In other words, the super-paid super-execs are merely surfing good economic waves.
When he poses the key question as to whether the 21st century will be as unequal as the early 20th was, Piketty puts forward some reasons to suggest that it might not. However, in spite of these and the different structure and composition of economics and inequality today, he concludes that there are no solid grounds for rejoicing, as a whole range of factors, such as state competition on taxation levels, and low or even negative demographic growth promise to make inequality of wealth increase substantially. Ultimately, the entrepreneur always turns into the rentier; it’s just that in some conditions, like our own, it happens with alarming rapidity.
III
Not everywhere is or was the same in such matters and the very fact of this difference encourages the conviction that these are political, and not solely economic issues and that they are therefore amenable to political responses. America, in particular, provides a fascinating counterpoint.
Strange as it sounds to us, inequality of wealth in the US in the 19th century was roughly what it was in Sweden in the 1970s. High net immigration levels, the fact that people tended to arrive with labour and not capital, and the greater availability of land encouraged economic growth and reduced the power of capital and therefore the levels of inequality. Total capital in America was less than three years’ worth of income when it was six or seven in Europe.
Moreover, inequality from income was also lower in the US than it was Europe then. The fact that inequality in the New World seemed to be catching up with that of Old greatly worried US economists a century ago (it doesn’t today, as Piketty acidly notes). Americans were worried that the nation was losing its pioneering, egalitarian spirit. Accordingly, in 1910-1920, the US established an astonishingly progressive estate tax on large fortunes, which were deemed to be incompatible with US values, as well as a progressive income tax on incomes thought to be excessive. Remarkably, to modern ears, America was the first country to raise tax rates to over 70 per cent, first on income in 1919-1922 and then on estates in 1937-39, in the wake of the Great Depression for which so many American’s blamed the financiers. Astonishingly, over the period of 1932-1980, top federal income tax rate for US averaged 81 per cent. Virtually no continental European nation ever imposed such high rates, the exceptions being Germany, in the unique circumstances of 1947-49, and the UK, which boasted an all-time peak of 98 per cent in the 1970s. Over the same period, top estate tax rate in the US remained at 70-80 per cent. Of course, within the US the picture is more complicated than this, with the relatively egalitarian North standing up against the most brutal and extreme form of inegalitarianism, namely slavery and its aftermath, in the South – but the comparison with Europe for much of this period is remarkable.
The seeds of today’s extreme inequality in the US were, however, sown during this period. Less physical destruction in World War Two had a lower impact on capital than it did in Europe. In addition, the historically lower and more stable income/capital ratio perhaps explains “why Americans seem to take a more benign view of capitalism than Europeans.” Either way, inequality in the US exploded post-1980, being driven primarily by the top centile whose share of national income rose from 9 per cent in 1970s to 20 per cent in first decade of 21st century. The top 1000th have increased their share even more, 2 per cent to nearly 10 per cent, while elsewhere, in France, Japan, Sweden for example, it stands at a ‘mere’ 2-2.5 per cent.
As with Europe, but far more so, income inequalities have reached levels of 100 years ago, though again the composition has changed, with a larger role being played by income from labour and less by capital. In early 2010s in the US, income from labour is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere, Piketty notes. If trends there continue, the bottom half could earn just half as much in total compensation as the top 10 per cent by 2030.
IV
Why does this matter? The first reason is that it looks set to continue. It is important to emphasise that the amount by which ‘r’ is greater than ‘g’ is not necessarily very much – a percentage or two a year maybe. However, by logic of cumulative growth, it doesn’t need to be very much in order to open up substantial levels of inequalities over decades. The reversion to historic low growth rates over recent decades in the West augurs capital’s return and technological progress will do little to offset this. Two hundred pages into the book, Piketty makes what he calls perhaps the most important lesson of his study thus far, namely that “modern technology still uses a great deal of capital and…because capital has many uses, one can accumulate enormous amounts of it without reducing its return to zero. Under these conditions, there is no reason why capital’s share must decrease over the very long run, even if technology changes in a way that is relatively favourable to the latter.”
Unlike in China where, for many working age currently experiencing income growth of 5-10 per cent a year, wealth for the immediate future at least will come from earnings and not from savings (that are invariably inherited from much poorer parents and grandparents), Westerners are more likely to get rich from what they inherit than from what they earn, the supermanagers aside.
This goes for institutions as much as for individuals. A particularly interesting section of Capital analyses the relative endowments and growths of US universities, the data for which unequivocally show that the bigger the investment the bigger the return. “By 2100, the entire planet could look like Europe at the turn of the 20th century, at least in terms of capital intensity.” The rich will keep on getting richer.
So, it matters because it seems like things are going to get worse. But it also matters, more substantively, because the consequences of growing inequality are worrying. This point has already been made often and well (while also being criticised thoroughly) most notably in Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level. Piketty doesn’t go into their level of detail but he does enough. Significant inequality, he argues, especially of capital, “radically undermine[s] the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based”, especially when that inequality appears arbitrary. “Most people”, he claims, believe that “modern growth naturally favours labour over inheritance and competence over birth”. Piketty shows they are wrong and worries about what they will do if that lesson sinks in.
Of the rentier societies depicted by Balzac (and Austen), he poses the question, “under such conditions, why work? Why behave morally at all? Since social inequality was in itself immoral and unjustified, why not be thoroughly immoral and appropriate capital by whatever means are available?” The same questions apply today, only more pointedly because at least the rentier society of the early 19th century never pretended to be meritocratic or good.
Inequality in Balzac’s time was judged to be a basic and unalterable condition of civilisation, even the divine order of things: “the rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate”, and all that. Today, people are where they are not by divine fiat but (in theory) on account of the use or abuse of the properties and opportunities they had (hence the ludicrous justifications of supermanagerial supersalaries: at least Fred the Shred earned his millions, rather than inheriting them). “Modern meritocratic society, especially in the US, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the grounds of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom.”
These are among the relatively few moments in the book when Capital sounds like its more famous predecessor of the same name, and a note of Marxish apocalypse creeps in. On-going inequality could “lead to significant political upheaval”. Such an “impoverishment of the middle class would very likely trigger a violent political reaction.” “A fiscal secession of the wealthiest citizens could potentially do great damage to fiscal consent in general” (this, by the way, following on from a jaw-dropping paragraph in which Piketty shows how in most countries taxes have actually become regressive at the top of the income hierarchy). “If the tax system is not made more progressive, it should come as no surprise that those who derive the least benefit from free trade may well turn against it.”
This, note, is Marxish not Marxist. Piketty admits that the great German’s idea concerning the principle of infinite capital accumulation “contains a key insight” but is otherwise quite critical, recognising that Marx’s conclusions about the collapse of capitalism were wrong, and that “he had decided on his conclusions in 1848 “before embarking on the research needed to justify them.” Not so, one senses, Piketty.
More to the point, and here we come to the nub of this essay, unlike his predecessor, Piketty is very wary of economic determinism. He takes r>g to be a “historical fact, not a logical necessity”. Marx’s iron laws were nothing like as rigid or inevitable as he imagined. But nor, critically, were the corresponding ideas of post-war theorists, such as Simon Kuznets, that income inequality would automatically decrease as capitalism developed. Here, he acidly remarks, we have simply from Marxist “apocalypse” to modern-day “fairy tale”. There is nothing inevitable in all this.
Hence, the light that so many liberals have found in Piketty’s book, shining in the darkness that has not yet overcome it. Inequality is real. It is growing. It will not be solved by the market. It will not naturally disappear. But nor is it natural. It is not inevitable. It is not predestined. Rather, it is a political issue, and it is amenable to political solutions, if only the political classes – or at least their social democratic caucus, would, as Prime Minister Jim Hacker once put it, grasp the nettle and take the bull by the horns.
V
This is hopeful. We ride not on iron rails of economic determinism, whether they travel to sunlit uplands of equality or down into the pit where there are a million allegedly culpable losers for every allegedly deserving winner. We are free to change the future. It is an alluring idea but there is a problem, best seen in returning to Piketty and, in particular, the middle section of his narrative arc: the period of declining and then least stable inequality between c.1914 and c. 1974.
The brutal but unavoidable fact is that it was war that was responsible for this seismic change in inequality. Prior to the shocks of 1914-1945, Piketty observes, there was no visible trend toward reduced inequality of capital ownership. “It was the wars of the twentieth century that wiped away the past to create the illusion that capitalism had been structurally transformed.” Illusion is a harsh word here, but the right one.
Part – but only a limited part – of this was due to the physical destruction of capital in warfare. In Britain, Piketty estimates, physical destruction of capital due to the Second World War was less than 10 per cent of national income (primarily through due to bombing raids), a tenth or fifteenth of what it was in France or Germany. Nevertheless, national capital in the UK still fell by four years of national income, as much as France or Germany. That was the result of politics. Simply put, capital could be taxed or expropriated at levels previously unthinkable because the alternative was worse. War, coming hard on the heels of a global depression widely associated with the inequality-breeding sins of global finance, created sufficient solidarity to enable the evisceration of the superrich. The post-war tax in France was, appropriately enough, called the solidarity tax.
Crucially, this continued after the fighting stopped. The shadow cast by the age of total war was a long one. Levels of income and inheritance taxation, housing prices, rent controls, coupled with demographic growth and the economic catchup that, as we have noted, was a natural consequence of a continent renewing itself after war, meant that the post-war decades experienced whatever the opposite of a perfect economic storm is – a perfect economic calm?
Those growing up in those decades came to think this was the ‘new normal’. People began to think of “natural” triumph of human capital over capital in traditional sense. Yet, as Capital shows, it isn’t. Even today the concentration of wealth has not fully recovered it pre-1914 levels and the existence of middle class means that it may not. But all the signs are that there is only one direction of travel.
The question is, then, if economic determinism doesn’t hold all the trump cards, and if political will made manifest through progressive taxation did reduce inequality in the past, why should it not do so now? Admittedly, there are some elements from that post-war perfect economic calm – demographic growth, economic catchup – that are just not in place for 21st century West. But, their absence notwithstanding, cannot politicians screw their courage to the sticking place and do the deed, whisper it: raise incomes taxes, make them much more progressive, or even, as Piketty argues at length in the fourth and final section of the book, develop a global, or at very least a continental, tax on capital. He (and others, including this reviewer) hopes so, but… here we stumble on the fault line running under the surface of his argument, and come to “the absence of war”.
David Hare’s 1993 play of that name depicted the woes of a Labour leader unable to connect with the electorate (it was written in the wake of Neil Kinnock’s surprise 1992 defeat but those who read it today may call to mind a rather more recent election shock). The title’s “absence of war” refers to how this generation of politicians, without ever having had to fight in a war on account of which “you have some sense of personal worth”, now just seek worth by keeping busy: “We work and hope we will feel we do good.”
This may well be true of contemporary politics, but there is another way in which the title is apposite for politics today, and specifically the political nature of the inequality Piketty discusses. War created not only worth, but solidarity, an overwhelmingly powerful sense of shared interest. The presence of an ‘other’, in particular a threatening other, often does that, and there were few more threatening others than Nazi Germany (although Soviet Russia had a not dissimilar effect on post-war European and North Atlantic politics). Put at its simplest, when the difference between us and them is that great and that terrifying, the differences between us and us shrink, and willingly or otherwise, we pool resources to secure our shared future. Inequality could be politically eviscerated during the long decades of war-depression-war because the social and cultural permission necessary for such significant political action was granted. Indeed, so strongly granted was it that it remained for decades afterwards. We did not sacrifice what we sacrificed in the war only to return to the status quo ante.
If we could do that then, then we can do so now. Eschewing ideas of rigid economic determinism, Piketty pins his hopes on democracy. One of his repeated refrains is that, once we have recognised that inequality is as much a political matter as an economic one, it becomes “a matter for democratic debate”. “If we are to regain control of capitalism,” he concludes in his final pages, “we must bet everything on democracy”. But that is one hell of a bet. What if the people don’t see things that way? “It is to be hoped that democratic deliberation will point in the right direction” he remarks on page 537.
It is to be hoped indeed but, as Piketty never quite admits, it’s a hope that is reaches high without ever examining the ground on which it stands. First time round, it wasn’t politics that reduced inequality but wartime politics, the uniquely solidaristic governance made possible by uniquely shared needs and concerns. Piketty knows this. “There was no gradual, consensual, conflict-free evolution toward greater equality”, he writes on page 275. “In the twentieth century it was war, and not harmonious democratic or economic rationality, that erased the past and enabled society to begin anew with a clean slate.” Or, elsewhere: “it was war that gave rise to progressive taxation, not the natural consequence of universal suffrage.” Or, again: “progressive taxation was as much a product of two world wars as it was of democracy”. [all emphases added]
To address inequality through the kinds of progressive taxation that Piketty (rightly) judges the only means of doing so, demands an overpowering sense of ‘us’ – or common identity, or social mores, or purposes, or enemies. It requires a certain, strong, shared space of public permission in which politicians can act. The Second World War (following hard on the heels of Depression and further total war) provided that in spades, revealing an alternative so ghastly that it made the demands it imposed on citizens seems slight in comparison. It cast a shadow of solidarity that lasted a generation and only then began to fade. But fade it has, and recapturing shadows is no easy task.
Without that, in “the absence of war”, justifying the kind of political activity necessary to reduce inequality becomes harder. More damningly still, the kind of petits rentiers inequality we witness in the early 21st century (as opposed to the extreme and obviously obnoxious grandes rentiers inequality a century ago) is even more difficult to correct politically “because it is a commonplace inequality opposing broad segments of the population rather than pitting a small elite against the rest of society”. It’s the problem of the American Dream: powerful enough to steer people’s energies into dreaming rather than campaigning. “It could be you.” In the absence of war, there are insufficient centripetal forces in Western societies to justify the kind of politics needed to address inequality adequately. It seems that we will always have the poor with us.
VI
Marxists like criticising Christians for their pessimistic determinism. It wasn’t the determinism that was the problem, of course. As we have seen, economic determinism played a major role in Marxist thought. That, however, was optimistic determinism, in which the iron rails of history led to utopia, and not to acquiescence. Pessimistic determinism – the poor will always be with you but at least you can comfort them with thoughts of heaven – is much worse.
This essay risks feeding that criticism. If it does so, it can at least quote Piketty for support. “To my knowledge,” he writes:
“no society has ever existed in which ownership of capital can reasonably be described as ‘mildly’ inegalitarian, by which I mean a distribution in which the poorest half of society would own a significant share (say, one fifth to one quarter) of total wealth… in all known societies, at all times, the least wealthy half of the population own virtually nothing.”
Is this pessimistic determinism, or simply an honest attentiveness to reality, one that waves aside the false hopes and fairy tales that see salvation either in “market forces” (which Piketty effectively skewers) or “debate” or “democracy” or “leadership” without ever thinking carefully through the reality of each of these saviours?
Honesty should not necessitate despair, however; it acts as a solvent on optimism not on hope. A Christian response should be hopeful, not naive. Thus, much as this is the point at which this essay should end on a stirring chorus that calls the army of Christian egalitarians to the barricades, such a chorus would be optimistic. We might not forget how Christian – dubiously Christian, perhaps, but Christian nonetheless – were the societies of Balzac and Austen and fin de siècle Paris and Edwardian Britain, where extreme inequality existed, seemingly impervious to objections and attempts to reduce it. There is no silver bullet of piety here.
We might, however, end on a note that takes us back to our title. The poor, Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 26, are “always with you”. Specifically, they will always be with you “but you will not always have me”. Yet, the same words are used – deliberately? – in the final line of Matthew’s gospel, as the resurrected Christ, as if responding to his earlier earthly claims, this time tells his disciples “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” His promise is one of presence, being with us, whatever.
“Always with you”: the problem of inequality is fundamentally one of not being with people. Vast and/or inherited and/or unmerited differences of wealth divorces us from one another, in extreme circumstances completely and permanently, so that we get Disraeli’s infamous “two nations”. As I have written elsewhere, it was the unprecedented and threatening bringing together of radically different groups of people – Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, young and old – within the earliest churches that sowed seeds that eventually and imperfectly cracked through the ineradicable inequalities of the ancient world, inequalities that went beyond the merely economic and make today’s look positively gentle.
Inequality becomes harder to justify, harder to sustain, if you find yourself breaking the same bread and drinking the same wine with others you would otherwise never meet – the reason why box pews and pew rents and the practice of separate communion vessels for rich and poor is not simply a matter of cultural distance but a wholesale desecration of the gospel. At the final count, it is only here, not in the cataclysmic circumstances of war, nor in the chirpily optimistic calls for democracy or debate or leadership, but in the deep, pre-political understanding that we are called to be with one another, that we will find a political answer to problem of inequality.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
Capital in the 21st Century is published by Harvard/ Belknap
Want to keep up with the latest news from Theos? Click here to join our monthly e-newsletter. We'll let you know about our latest reports, blogs and events.
Image by Sue Gardner from Wikimedia available under this Creative Commons Licence
