Цитаты из книги Краткая история равенства

The first factor was the welfare state’s spectacular rise in power. This long-term development was in large measure the result of social struggles and mobilization of the socialist and labor movements since the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it was greatly accelerated by the two world wars and the Depression…

Finally, it will be noted that rather than using a multiplicity of indicators, one alternative solution might consist in synthesizing them in a single indicator. For example, the Human Development Index (HDI) worked out by the United Nations aggregates data regarding health care, education, and national income to arrive…

In the nineteenth century, social welfare budgets remained parsimonious, taxes were regressive, and the progress made by these indicators was extremely slow, not to say insignifcant.

The welfare state and progressive taxation, pushed to their logical conclusions, allow us to lay the foundations for a new form of democratic socialism: self-managing, decentralized, and based on the continual circulation of power and property. This system differs entirely from the kind of centralized, authoritarian state…

Although it is preferable to focus on the national income (after taking into account the consumption of natural capital and the corresponding social cost) and on the inequality of its distribution, rather than confining ourselves to the GDP and to averages, that is nonetheless not sufficient. In fact, no matter what…

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all the world’s fiscal systems were clearly regressive, in the sense that they were usually based on sales taxes and indirect taxes representing a proportionately heavier burden on the poorest people than on the wealthiest. The most extreme case of a regressive tax is…

Between 1914 and 1980, this tax burden tripled in the United States and more than quadrupled in Europe. In France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, tax receipts have amounted to between 40 and 50 percent of the national income since the 1980s and 1990s. Numerous studies have shown that the fiscal state’s rise in…

At present, humanity is in better health than it has ever been; it also has more access to education and culture than ever before. Information collected in many inquiries and censuses allows us to estimate that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, hardly 10 percent of the world population over the age of ffeen…

Concretely, whereas the Chinese or Ottoman states were militarily neck and neck with the European states in the sixteenth century and for most of the seventeenth (the Ottomans’ last siege of Vienna dates from 1683), the continual competition among European states helped them develop a state capacity that resulted in their…

Simplifying, we can say that until the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no genuine middle class, in the sense that the middle 40 percent were almost as poor (in terms of their share in total property ownership) as the poorest 50 percent. Conversely, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the…