The gist of Thomas Piketty's latest, A Brief History of Equality, is that inequality has been shrinking, not growing, for the past 300 years. Rotten institutions have been and continue to be replaced by better (or at least less rotten) ones. Income per person has increased (using today's purchasing power) from less than 100 euros to nearly a thousand euros per month. By the 1990s, he points out, GDP per hour worked was almost equal in the USA, France, and Germany. And this despite increased leisure time, a reduced work week, and more paid time off - that is wildly different in each country. The reduced hours and increased time off are the focus of endless studies, by labor, economists and the media. But by focusing on them, the media as well as economists missed the bigger point that GDP per hour was nearly equal across very different societal structures. Had they only known, it would have changed their entire range of outlooks. This is the kind of insight Piketty is able generate with easier access to far more data. It sets the tone for the book. Better outcomes can be seen if you know how and where to look.

That thousand euros a month, it should be noted, comes with a cost. To the planet. These so-called externalities are bills that are starting to be called right now, and will become far more damaging to the standard of living as time goes on. He says putting a monetary value on the environment cannot be done, so there is no amount of money that would accurately account for the damage or reduce the average monthly income. He calls it an intellectual and political dead end, but once again, it is where everyone is looking and publishing.

Inequality comes into it as the rich have polluted far more per person, while the poor suffer more per person. He criticizes the waste and pollution of billionaires building their own spaceships, while those in the global South can't have a sanitary toilet. The absurd geo-engineering proposals of billionaires will, once again, make everything far worse (as I have written elsewhere too). But Piketty has solutions for this, later on.

I have to say I am uncomfortable with his whole notion of carbon emissions per person. It simply weighs more heavily on less populated countries. So while North Americans are responsible for far more emissions (60% of the top 1% emitters), China, with four times as many people in a far smaller area, is much farther down the list in pollution per person. And this, even though Chinese cities (and there are a lot of them) top the league tables in unbreathable air every day, in competition with Indian cities - same story. Pollution doesn't care about how many people are involved. The whole planet is suffering from it. Not less in China than in the US. It just shows how dicey making claims with stats really can be. I wish he had been able to discover a more insightful metric in this domain as well.

Piketty says that only now are we finally able to analyze whole societies. There are enough records kept, old records digitized, and enough computerized data organized for retrieval, that economists like him are able to draw new insights from them. He has been at the forefront of this research. This book demonstrates new ways of looking at the world. I estimate that at least a third of the footnotes cite Thomas Piketty as their source.

He says the data portend great things: "The language of socioeconomic indicators is an indispensible complement to the natural language for fighting intellectual nationalism, escaping the manipulations of economic elites, and building a new egalitarian horizon." He is a man of the left, intolerant of intolerance, eager to share equally, and address injustices everywhere.

One equality issue is democracy. Despite the daily headlines, it is far better now than it used to be. The inequalities over the past 300 years are stunning. For example, the USA restricted the vote to only 6% of the population in its first election. Similar hypocrisy can be found round the world. Just describing how various supposedly democratic functions work in various societies, the inequalities jump off the pages of this book. In comparing voting rules in several countries, it transpired that Sweden had the most unequal system of all the unequal systems. Depending on taxes paid, wealth and income, the rich in Sweden could vote up to 100 times, sometimes giving one man the right and the power to elect whomever he alone wanted among the few eligible to vote at all.

Tax deductible political donations by the rich, who can afford the maximum, compare badly with the bottom 50% who struggle with the lowest amounts from any group. They also mean the poor have to make up for taxes not collected because of the massive deductions by the rich. The wealthy continue to divert ever more of what should be tax dollars to favored politicians. In the USA, since corporations are now people, those tax sources also end up in the hands of politicians who permit this situation to be.

He looks at the history of change and concludes that whatever rules are put in place, be they constitutions or laws, they raise barriers and are meant to make it difficult to effect change. The enabling documents actively prevent progress. For example: "None of the regime changes that have occurred in France since 1789 (there are about ten of them) took place in accord with the rules set for them by their predecessors," he says. Change is rough work, of necessity.

Piketty finds there are four large areas that factor in equality: the welfare state, progressive taxation, real equality, and anti-discrimination. The second half of the book is mostly about them.

The welfare state revolves around education, health and pensions. When nations began to divert funds into education, their economies tended to take off. Starting from zero before 1700, from 1700 to 1850 he found 1-2% of tax receipts went into education. That became 6-8% in the next 50 years, 10% after 1900, and 30% now. The welfare state is the clear winner over non-participation by government. It is a critical factor in improving equality and general welfare. It is a similar story in healthcare and in social security. Where they are implemented, societies flourish. Cut them back, and the whole society suffers. This is a talking point more politicos need to employ.

Land has, up until now, always been the basis of wealth, distorting economies and performance for centuries. At some point, someone said: this area is mine alone and no one else can use it - ever. And the rot set in. GDP and society as a whole became captured by property values and rents. Piketty proposes to take ownership back. It would sort of melt away fiscally as time went on, eventually reverting to the state for someone else to use upon dissolution or death.

He would cap entrepreneurs' ability to grow filthy rich while co-workers barely earn a living. He would give workers seats on boards, much as is the case in western Europe already, that would eventually give them control. He would heavily tax inheritances to break up multi-billion dollar estates. He would pool those assets, and give every citizen $25,000 at age 25, to start their own lives on a more solid footing (since the bottom 50% tend to own essentially no property at all). This is similar to giving every child a funded bank account, a popular topic in Washington, except we know where the money will come from under Piketty's idea. He calls all this "the continual circulation of power and property."

It is a little surprising that Piketty does not credit or even mention Henry George, who framed the evils of private property 150 years ago in a global best selling book that shook people out of their miserable state of affairs and gave them hope. Property cannot be walled off from the world. The top ten percent cannot claim ownership of 90% of it. Minerals do not belong to property owners. Getting rich by raping the planet, and crippling it in doing so, cannot simply go on as is. Henry George spelled out solutions. Piketty sees practical ways of implementing them.

There could of course be no analysis of inequality without a discussion of slavery, and Piketty is ready, with new depth. His stats show where the concentration of slaves were, often making up 90% of the population. The economics of slavery were gigantic, making all the difference in the world. Slave revolts could and did upset entire national economies.

The colonies, Belgian, German, Italian, French, Dutch and English - were all stripped of any value. They were required to buy everything they needed from the mother country, at prices that were not negotiable. They were taxed mercilessly. They were not allowed to produce finished products. Education in the colonies was absurdly elitist, with 40 times as much spent on the education of the few wealthy from the mother country as on all the children native to the colony. Colonialism got everything wrong, turned everything upside down, and created intolerable inequality.

Mind you, things are only somewhat better today. Piketty's figures show that in the US, a child's chance of getting into university varies directly with its parents' income. Children of the 90th percentile have a 90% chance of getting in. Those whose parents in the 10th percentile have a 10% chance. The graph shows a straight line at a 45 degree angle. School funding is prejudiced towards richer areas, because a 5% increase means a lot more money for them than in a poorer school with a smaller budget and a building that is both inadequate and failing. And university endowments have grown as big some countries' GDP, which is clearly out of control (Piketty would reabsorb those funds too). But I digress. There's a lot coming at the reader in this book.

He calls for slavery reparations, and shows how they could be valued and how they could work. He thinks we really can't go forward as we would like to without resolving the issues of the past. On the other hand, his reparations plans do not include natives of the western hemisphere, whose few descendants are still discriminated against as much as those of slaves. Their ancestors were eliminated in genocide. Once you get started down the reparations road, where do you stop?

Being French, Piketty has special interest and knowledge to skewer his own country for its slavery, colonialism, world-beating greed and hypocrisy. It was France that in giving up on its slave colony now known as Haiti, extracted a treaty to leave it alone in exchange for "reparations" at a rate three times the GDP of the country. This has of course crippled the economy and made Haiti a neverending disaster point in the world. Despite numerous calls to return the money, France turns a deaf ear, and keeps plugging away at maintaining influence over its crumbling west African colonies, currently horribly unstable and dealing with constant harassment from ISIS and the resident military.

France banned slavery during its revolution of 1789, but Napoleon revived it jut 15 years later, in order to feed his war machine and financial backers. Racial discrimination in France today is rampant. Identical résumés topped with French names have four times the success in obtaining an interview as those with African or Muslim names. An African accented phone call will be told the apartment has already been rented, but a Parisian accented call just a minute later will receive an invitation to view it. Yet in its arrogance, France has declared everyone equal, and since there is no discrimination in the country any more, no one is allowed to collect data on it. By law. This is something one might expect to issue from a Vladimir Putin or a Xi Jinping, not a French president. So there is work to be done on inequality there today too.

Progressive taxation charges more to the rich than the poor. When countries implemented such policies, their economies bloomed. Top tax rates up to 90% had a most interesting effect on equality, according to Piketty's figures. Employers stopped paying outrageous salaries, since most of it went to taxes. Instead, the money got distributed as better pay down the line, improving the equality balance throughout the company. As Piketty puts it: "Beyond a certain level, there is no meaningful relation between managers' salaries and their economic performance and that these remunerations have mainly negative effects on low and middle-level salaries." Progressive taxation corrected it.

Progressive tax systems are directly correlated to better economic performance, not worse, he found. That governments have been lobbied by special interests into abandoning progressive rates is hurting economies all over the world. He says that top rates were cut in half to encourage growth but have had the opposite effect, reducing growth from 2.2% to 1.1% on average, globally. "Historically, it is the battle for equality and education that has made economic development and human progress possible, and not the veneration of property, stability and inequality."

The globalization and free trade movement ties these faults together like a Christmas gift bow. The rich have bullied their way to making their money stateless. That is, non-resident anywhere, and so untaxable anywhere. If anything is not to their profit, the rich can move their money elsewhere, tax-free. The rich nations have used threats and extortion to encourage the poorer nations to agree to this scheme. Former colonies, struggling to overcome their losing positions, seem the greatest to suffer from it: "If we examine their tax receipts in proportion to GDP, we see that the poorest states on the planet became poorer between 1970-1980 and 1990-2000, before gaining slightly between 2000 and 2020, though never reaching their starting point (which was very low to begin with). The fall in tax receipts is explained almost entirely by the loss of customs duties." He says their receipts stagnated at 15% of GDP, while rich countries' receipts climbed to their current 30 to 40%. How is this possible? The poorer countries had no time to craft and implement alternate revenue streams. They were simply and suddenly high and dry. They were told it would be good for them. Trickle down and other lies. For the rich, everywhere became a tax haven. "Making the market sacred and in absolute respect for property rights acquired in the past, whatever their magnitude or their origin, are only incoherent constructs seeking to perpetuate injustices and positions of power that are without foundation and that in the final analysis merely pave the way for new crises." In Fred Allen's lovely turn of phrase - a treadmill to oblivion.

Piketty sees all his progressive changes as attractive and doable. He sees global acceptance towards a goal of global equality, to the point of global management of redistributions of wealth and property.

The problem of course, is getting every nation to see the benefits. Just like in elections, when people vote against their own best interests, so internationally, getting countries to agree unanimously is all but impossible. Even something as seemingly trivial as droppng Standard Time for year-round Dayight Savings Time is opposed by some countries in the EU, preventing it from happening at all.

On top of that, not all countries are run rationally. The increasing number of military juntas and civilian dictatorships are non-cooperative at best. From Myanmar to Mali, from North Korea to Nicaragua, seeing things through a cost-benefit and equality lens is not on the table.

Progressives have made inroads, with various programs and pilots popping up in countries around the world. Universal basic income gets more exposure today than it ever has, for example. This book collects a large number of intriguing policies that could change the nature of society from winner take all to equal and supportive.

But Piketty is not naive: "I am not suggesting that such a system could easily be set up next month, but simply insisting on the fact that no less gigantic transformations of the legal, fiscal and social system continually occurred between 1780 and 2020, and that this process is not going to stop suddenly now." "The concrete forms of economic power and democracy still require reinvention, and always will." So the future is open to change as equality continues its slow but hopefully relentless spread.

David Wineberg