Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
On 24 May 2024 MORSE facilitated and hosted at SBE premises Branko Milanovic’s book presentation: Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. On the same day, Branko Milanovic held a Masterclass with four invited students from a wide range of academic advancement.
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.
Also read
-
Professor Rob Bauer, Professor of Finance at the Maastricht School of Business and Economics and holder of the Peter Elverding Chair, is the winner of the Greening Finance Prize 2024. This prestigious prize is awarded by the University of Oxford.
-
Each year, students in the Netherlands rate the quality of their Universities and study programmes in the National Student Survey (NSE). This year’s results on the survey’s core questions positioned Maastricht University School of Business and Economics (SBE) in first place again, making it the leading faculty for business and economics education in the country for four years in a row.
-
Why do female entrepreneurs struggle to secure funding in today’s competitive ecosystem? Despite efforts to level the playing field, women continue to face significant barriers when pitching their ventures to investors. But with a growing focus on sustainability and social impact, can female-led businesses be the key to driving global change? A recent study presented at the ERSA Congress aims to shine a light on how female-focused investment networks are breaking down these barriers and reshaping the entrepreneurial landscape.