Thomas Piketty A Brief History of Equality-平等简史

Thomas Piketty认为全球实现平等的进展比人们想象的要乐观得多。人类社会已经为提升人们的生活质量并实现更公平的收入和资产分配做出了可衡量的改善，并仍在朝着这些目标进行努力。不过，要彻底解决今天的不平等问题，我们还需要新的解决方案。作者认为需要在财政税收方面重拾更大幅度的累进性，包括对高收入者大幅提高所得税率、对富人征收全球财富税、实施基本收入政策以及债务取消计划。

书名：A Brief History of Equality《平等简史》

作者：Thomas Piketty, Steven Rendall(Translator)

简介：The world's leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.

It's easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.

Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It's a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.