Patrick Luciani: Is economic inequality the greatest of all plagues?

In this week’s Hub book review, Patrick Luciani examines The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx (Princeton University Press, 2024), by David Lay Williams, which attempts to make the case that the concentration of wealth has been a historical problem that many of the world’s most prominent political thinkers have tried to solve. 

Economics is usually taught as a technical subject that maximizes economic growth by using monetary and fiscal policies to keep inflation and unemployment low. This is called positive economics, which treats consumers and businesses as bloodless utility and profit maximizers.

However, something changed after the financial crisis in 2008. Overnight, we saw the human damage of a financial and economic system that became untethered to the real world, where the rich protected themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.

Economic inequality became front of mind in culture as economists such as Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz, and Thomas Piketty, who in his best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pointed out the growing disparity between the rich and poor. Movements like Occupy Wall Street reminded us of the wealth gap with their slogan, “We are the 99 percent.” Economics started shifting to normative economics, which is more interested in how wealth is distributed than its creation.

Economic inequality is nothing new in human history. Until the 18th century, the bigger problem for most people was poverty and staying alive, let alone worrying about equality, especially in a world ordained by God or nature. A new book, The Greatest of All Plagues, by David Lay Williams, however, disputes that economic disparities and concentration of wealth were not at the top of the minds of the most significant political thinkers throughout the ages.

Professor Williams, who teaches political science at DePaul University, looks deeply at the ideas of Plato, Jesus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx and argues that they all saw economic inequality as we see it today, as a source of political instability and “a corrupter of character and soul,” and if left unchecked will damage civic harmony, peace, and democracy. The term “greatest of all plagues” comes from Plato’s Athenian Stranger in the Laws, which refers to civil war caused by extreme economic inequality and the concentration of wealth.

Though the term “inequality” doesn’t appear in the Bible or the Gospels, Williams reminds us of Jesus’ words that the kingdom of God has no place for the rich. The Hebrew laws of Sabbatical and Jubilee also recognized that justice and fairness were essential to rebalancing wealth distribution as a matter of moral duty. These ancient laws required that all debts be forgiven every seven years and all property be restored to an equitable distribution every fifty years.

Rousseau was the most articulate and critical of the wealthy and closely analyzed the pathologies of inequality in his famous essay, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” written in 1754. Inequality to Rousseau was an affront to his beloved notion of the “general will,” where the state has a duty to distribute wealth so that each citizen has neither too little nor too much. For Rousseau, income inequality breeds greed and avarice, vices not found in nature. Perfect equality is found only in the state of nature where all are equal before the corruption of society. Hence his famous saying, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” He and Plato lived in a zero-sum world, where wealth was fixed and could only be increased if taken or stolen from another.

To make Smith an ally to William’s argument, since Smith saw free trade and markets as a way out of poverty, Williams appeals to Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith worries that wealth isolates the rich from others and will show less compassion or sympathy to the poor. Though never an egalitarian, Hobbes insists that poverty results in resentment and envy that lead directly to the “sources of sedition and war.”

Mill saw the dangers of growing wealth concentration and advocated inheritance taxes even though the poor were better off when wealth expanded with greater commerce, trade, and competition. Mill also advocated for public education for the poor, increasing their chances for greater freedom and less poverty. To make his point, Williams turns to Piketty’s research to show that in 1770, the top 10 percent of British citizens owned 90 percent of total private property, and the top 1 percent possessed 60 percent.

Of these six selected political thinkers, Marx is the most ambivalent. Inequality for Marx was inevitable under capitalism. Even the famous communist phrase attributed to Marx, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” was not a call for income equality. Nonetheless, poverty, or low income, places a psychic cost on workers that leads to dissatisfaction, depression, and demoralization.

Williams puts much work into his efforts to deepen the idea that focus on economic inequality isn’t new but can be found in the canon of political ideas over 2000 years. But does he make his case that income inequality is the greatest plague of our time?

He starts by taking Piketty’s work at face value without any mention that the French economist’s work has faced significant criticism in his methodology and conclusions.

Williams also criticizes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and renowned economist Deidre McCloskey for defending an economic system that creates wealth. He dismisses them, claiming they ignore the total damage of an economically unequal society that favours billionaires over the poor. It’s hard to imagine telling Pinker and McCloskey that they hadn’t considered the implications of their ideas.

Where does this all leave us now? Ultimately, Williams never tells the reader what he thinks is an ideal level of wealth distribution and what it would entail.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is long over. The rhetoric that inspired its demonstrations has proved, in time, unconvincing to the 99 percent it was supposed to animate. In the recent U.S. election, working-class Americans dramatically shifted away from their traditional Democratic Party. Is it possible that advocates for greater economic parity are wrong when low-income earners preferred lower taxes and higher incomes over equality?