The Global Crisis: Seeing It Whole

If important new studies of social and economic failure can be fused with awareness of environmental and security trends, the chances of progress will be multiplied.

by Paul Rogers

There have been many books published about the failures of the global economic system since the onset of the financial crash since 2007-08, but two in particular compel attention. The first is Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level (2009), which analysed in great depth the many ways in which inequality harms society and people's life-chances. The second is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), a magisterial historical overview of the entire system of capital whose copious research examines its inconsistencies and shows how its very structure consolidates extremes of wealth and poverty, and prevents it from delivering equity.

A common reaction to The Spirit Level among hostile commentators was that it merely repeated what everyone already knew, that inequality is bad. This dismissal reflected a wider consternation of free-market ideologues who were unable to counter the book's arguments. The book (subtitled "why more equal societies almost always do better") survived the sneers, and continues to be a major influence on social and economic thinking about a better system.