Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War

Visions of Inequality looks at how income distribution was perceived and studied by the most important economists from before the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War. It takes us from Quesnay and the physiocrats, for whom social classes were prescribed by law and who introduced the notion of the economic surplus, through the classic nineteenth-century treatises of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. They saw class as an economic category defined by the ownership of means of production.

Milanovic argues that The Wealth of Nations is significantly more concerned with inequality and its bad effects than The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a view that is contrary to some recent interpretations of Smith. Chapters on Ricardo and Marx discuss their view of changes in income distribution as capitalism evolves, and argue that frequent ascription to Marx of “the immiseration of labor” hypothesis is based on very selective quotes from Marx’s texts. A much broader view, consistent with Marx’s other positions and textually more defensible, is proposed instead.  

The book then moves to Pareto for whom income distribution was a matter of elites versus the rest of the population, and Kuznets who saw inequality arising from the urban-rural divide. In its last chapter it explains why inequality studies were eclipsed during the Cold War, before their remarkable resurgence as a central preoccupation in economics today.