Issue, No.33 (March 2025)

“Visions of Inequality”
Branko Milanovic in conversation with Francisco Ferreira and Janet Gornick

On 27 February — as part of the 2ND III/LIS COMPARATIVE ECONOMIC INEQUALITY CONFERENCE — a special evening event was held, focused on Branko Milanovic’s book Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (Harvard University Press, 2023).

Milanovic is a Research Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a Senior Scholar in the Stone Center. Professors Francisco Ferreira (International Inequalities Institute, LSE) and Janet Gornick (Stone Center, Graduate Center-CUNY) direct LIS’ two satellite offices — i.e., the UK and US offices, respectively.

The event was co-sponsored by the POST Luxembourg and took place at their venue in Luxembourg City, with approximately 150 people in the audience. Serge Allegrezza (STATEC, POST, and LIS Boards) introduced the event. Milanovic presented a brief overview of the core lines of argument in the book, after which he joined Ferreira and Gornick in conversation. The event closed with an audience Q&A.

Visions of Inequality presents an original history of how economists – six in particular – thought about inequality. The book’s six “main characters,” whose work spanned two centuries, have all been extensively studied. But, in this book, Milanovic revisits them and, in what is essentially a series of imaginary dialogs, he asks each of them: “What forces in your view determine income distribution and how do you see income distribution and inequality evolving in the future?” The book has been described as a “genealogy” of the discourse surrounding inequality. One reviewer said that it was “researched with forensic thoroughness,” while others have described Milanovic’s unique interpretations of these historical figures to be as unexpected as they are persuasive. Angus Deaton called Visions of Inequality “a truly important book.”

The heart of the book features the six historic figures chosen by Milanovic – with one chapter devoted to each – François Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, and Simon Kuznets. Those chapters are followed by an analysis of what Milanovic refers to as “the long eclipse”, the period from the 1960s to 1990, during which, he argues, inequality studies essentially went underground. It closes with an “epilogue” focused on the contemporary period, which he describes as a time of revival.

In his prepared remarks, Milanovic introduced the underlying logic of the book, emphasizing that he chose to take no normative approach. He explained that the book’s objective was to look at how these canonical economists thought about income distribution. He explained that there are two parts to the questions that interest him and that he metaphorically asked these thinkers. The first is, what are the forces they see as determining income distribution in the place and time where and when they were writing. The second concerns how they see the evolution of income distribution in the future, taking into account the place and time in which they are situated. Milanovic explained that, for him, the choice of these six economists was not difficult because all are canonical figures generally studied in histories of economic thought, although he acknowledges that there is also a subjective or idiosyncratic element reflective of his own preferences and knowledge.

Milanovic presented this summary slide, in which he placed the work of these six thinkers into a temporal framework:

Following his presentation, Ferreira and Gornick engaged Milanovic in a lively conversation.

Although they covered multiple topics, most of their exchange focused on Milanovic’s analysis of “the long eclipse.” Gornick recalled that their mutual colleague Paul Krugman argued, earlier, that Milanovic neglected to recognize that international trade theorists working during that period had, in fact, focused on inequality, both implicitly and explicitly. She fleshed out that critique by adding that Milanovic, who essentially blamed the right for the eclipse, omitted some key thinkers more associated with the left, such as John Kenneth Galbraith, who also contributed to “the eclipse” by focusing greater concerns on rampant consumerism.

Ferreira argued that Milanovic had given short shrift to human capital theory and empirics, including the works of Gary Becker, Jacob Mincer, Richard Freeman – all the way to Claudia Goldin, Larry Katz, Alan Krueger, and others. He pointed out that Milanovic referred to this body of work as “incidental studies of inequality” (which drew a laugh from the audience).

Gornick also questioned Milanovic about the exclusion of scholars from the global south, as well as the notable absence of any discussion of redistribution, a topic so central to contemporary studies of inequality, especially those based on the LIS data. Ferreira closed by remarking that, in his view, what Milanovic labels as “purely empirical studies”, including early work by Tony Atkinson, François Bourguignon, and others, deserves more praise than Milanovic gives them, adding that insights from that early work, particularly on how different measures are sensitive to different parts of the distribution, address the very nature of dispersion in a distribution; they transcend, as Ferreira put it, “just measurement”.

From left to right: Janet Gornick (CUNY), Tom Haas (STATEC), Branko Milanovic (CUNY), Serge Allegrezza (STATEC & POST), Francisco Ferreira (LSE).

Milanovic responded to all of these remarks and questions, agreeing with some of the criticisms – including the absence of key voices from the left, the exclusion of inequality studies focused on labor, the dismissal of work focused on measurement, the neglect of economists from the global south, and the lack of reflection on redistribution – while reiterating that what he included, versus excluded, reflected his decades of engaging with economic history and scholarship on inequality. Visions of Inequality, Milanovic said, verges on memoir; that is, it captures his personal journey rooted in decades of reading. Ferreira, in the end, summed up the exchange with a crucial observation: “It is, after all, your book.”

The program closed with an engaged and enthusiastic exchange with the audience.