blah blah dissent is shit
Rather dry look at the history of the inequality studies, somewhat interesting i think.
Milanovic’s revision, which evokes the perpetual seesawing between market and society in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, rescues the Kuznets hypothesis from its obvious incompatibility with the empirical record. But it only does so by introducing a fundamental indeterminacy to the very heart of the model. The vagueness of Milanovic’s formulations about “political and social forces” gestures to a missing theory of power and politics—a problem that inspired Piketty’s assay of institutional and ideological legitimations of inequality in Capital and Ideology (2020). To grasp where inequality is headed—much less to change it—we will need to go beyond the economic altogether.
