Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
Branko Milanovic
Jul 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Adam Barr
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11 hr 42 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
A sweeping and original history of how economists across two centuries have thought about inequality, told through portraits of six key figures. Visions of Inequality takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, who saw class as a purely economic category driven by means of production. It shows how Pareto reconceived class as a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, while Kuznets saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. And it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today. Meticulously extracting each author's view of income distribution from their often voluminous writings, Milanovic offers an invaluable genealogy of the discourse surrounding inequality. These intellectual portraits are infused not only with a deep understanding of economic theory but also with psychological nuance, reconstructing each thinker's outlook given what was knowable to them within their historical contexts and methodologies. Milanovic argues that we cannot speak of "inequality" as a general concept: any analysis of it is inextricably linked to a particular time and place.
About the author
Branko Milanovic is visiting presidential professor and core faculty at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department. His books include Global Inequality and The Haves and the Have-Nots.
Adam Barr, a recovering lawyer, former golf industry executive, former singing telegram messenger, and former print and television reporter, now bends the energy of all those "formers" toward his passion for acting and singing. He lives near New York City with his family.
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