A Brief History of Equality

“The idea that each country–or worse yet–each person in each country is individually responsible for its production and its wealth, makes little sense from a historical point of view. All wealth is collective in origin.”

“The growth of wealth in the Western world, like that in Japan or China, has long been based on the international division of labor and the feverish exploitation of natural and human resources worldwide. All these accumulations of wealth that have taken place on our planet depend on a global economic system, and it is at that level that the question of justice should be raised and the march toward equality pursued.”

“Between 1780 and 2020, we see developments tending toward greater equality of status, property, income, genders, and races within most regions and societies on the planet, and to a certain extent when we compare these societies on the global scale.”

“Although it is easy to denounce the inegalitarian or oppressive nature of established institutions and governments, it is much harder to agree on the alternative institutions that will make it possible to make real progress toward social, economic, and political equality, while at the same time respecting individual rights, including the right to be different. The task is not at all impossible, but it requires us to accept deliberation, the confrontation of differing points of view, compromises, and experimentation. Above all, it requires us to accept the fact that we can learn from the historical trajectories and experiences of others, and especially that the exact content of just institutions is not known a priori and is worth debating as such.”

“The movement toward equality still has a long way to go, especially in a world in which the poorest, and particularly the poorest in the poorest countries, are preparing to be subjected, with increasing violence, to climatic and environmental damage caused by the richest people’s way of life.”

“Then the investment in education grew almost tenfold in the course of the twentieth century and reached about 6 percent of the national income in all Western countries during the 1980s and 1990s, making it possible to finance almost universal access to secondary education, with a clear advance in access to higher education. Within this general landscape marked by the expansion of education, the United States’ edge was particularly prominent around the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, the proportion of children aged twelve to seventeen (boys and girls taken together) enrolled in secondary education was already almost 80 percent in the United States. At the same time, the rate of enrollment in secondary schools was between 20 and 30 percent in the United Kingdom and France, and barely reached 40 percent in Germany and Sweden.”

“Although it is easy to denounce the inegalitarian or oppressive nature of established institutions and governments, it is much harder to agree on the alternative institutions that will make it possible to make real progress toward social, economic, and political equality, while at the same time respecting individual rights, including the right to be different.”

“In the United States, the situation is still more extreme: the poorest 50 percent owned barely 2 percent of the total in 2020, as opposed to 72 percent for the richest 10 percent, and 26 percent for the patrimonial middle class.”