Equality

1. Equality is a historical movement driven by social mobilization and democratic participation, not an impossible dream.

In the long run there’s been a movement toward more equality.

Historical progress. Thomas Piketty argues that despite contemporary stark inequalities, the multi-century trend bends toward equality. This progress is not accidental but the result of sustained social mobilization, democratic awareness, and political struggles. It is a battle that can be won because it has been won repeatedly in the past.

Key milestones. The journey toward a more egalitarian world has advanced through major historical disruptions:

• The abolition of aristocratic privileges during the French Revolution.
• The eradication of slavery and the rise of labor movements in the nineteenth century.
• The expansion of universal suffrage and the creation of the social state in the twentieth century.

Democratic appetite. Ultimately, the driving force behind this historical trajectory is the human appetite for self-government, dignity, and equal access to fundamental goods. Understanding these past victories prepares us to win the next phase of the battle against modern economic disparities.

2. True equality requires taking essential sectors like health and education entirely out of the market's profit logic.

You take entire economic sectors out of the power of the profit motive.

Beyond cash transfers. Traditional social democracy often focuses merely on redistributing income through taxes and transfers. However, a more radical and effective approach is decommodification—ensuring that essential human goods are accessed outside of market logic. This limits the power of money to dictate the terms of human survival.

Proven success. Taking sectors out of the market is not a utopian fantasy; it is already a massive, highly successful reality in modern economies:

• Education and healthcare make up nearly 25% of the economy in developed nations.
• Publicly funded European health systems achieve better outcomes with less GDP share than the profit-driven US system.
• Non-profit structures preserve the integrity of research and learning in elite universities.

A radical future. To meet twenty-first-century challenges, we must expand this decommodified social state. If the vast majority of life's necessities are freely accessible, monetary inequality loses its power to create destructive social distances.

3. When we put everything up for sale, we degrade the moral meaning of social practices and destroy intrinsic motivation.

I think by commodifying everything and giving higher financial incentives, higher pay, you destroy a lot of what people actually care about in their job, in their life.

The corruption argument. Commodification does more than block access for those who cannot afford goods; it actively degrades and cheapens the intrinsic value of social practices. When market logic invades spheres like education, health, and culture, it replaces noble motivations with transactional, instrumental thinking.

Eroding professional integrity. Financializing public services corrupts both providers and recipients:

• Paying teachers based on student test scores leads to "teaching to the test" rather than deep learning.
• Treating healthcare as a shareholder-driven business prioritizes billing over patient well-being.
• Viewing higher education as a mere career-credentialing machine crowds out the love of learning.

Political valuation. Economists often pretend that market prices are neutral reflections of consumer preferences. In reality, valuing goods is always a deeply political and moral process that requires democratic deliberation rather than market surrender.

4. By embracing hyper-globalization and market triumphalism, progressive parties paved the way for right-wing populism.

This was the Democratic Party in the US, the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party in France – parties now more identified with the values, interests, and outlook of the well-educated, credentialed, professional classes than with the working-class voters who once constituted their primary base.

The progressive betrayal. During the 1990s and 2000s, center-left leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder accepted the core premises of Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism. Instead of challenging market triumphalism, they championed hyper-globalization, financial deregulation, and the free flow of capital.

The populist backlash. This surrender of the working class to global market forces directly prepared the ground for right-wing populism:

• The 2008 financial bailout protected Wall Street while leaving ordinary homeowners to suffer.
• Free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO expansion hollowed out industrial communities.
• Left-wing parties became the political home of highly educated winners, leaving the working class feeling abandoned.

Reclaiming the left. To defeat authoritarian nationalism, progressive parties must look at their own shortcomings. They must abandon their fear of democratic redistribution and offer a genuine democratic socialist alternative that controls capital, not just borders.

5. The illusion of a fair meritocracy breeds hubris in winners and humiliation in losers, fracturing social solidarity.

As inequality deepened, as working people faced stagnant wages and job loss, mainstream politicians of the center-left and center-right offered working people some bracing advice: "If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to university."

The meritocratic illusion. The ideal of meritocracy suggests that if everyone has equal opportunity, the winners deserve their success and the losers deserve their failure. This seemingly attractive principle has a dark, corrosive side that poisons social solidarity and polarizes democratic societies.

Hubris and humiliation. Meritocracy creates a psychological divide that tears communities apart:

• Winners inhale too deeply of their success, forgetting the luck, privilege, and public infrastructure that aided them.
• Losers are humiliated, led to believe that their economic struggles are entirely their own fault.
• The "rhetoric of rising" acts as a collective insult to those who do not hold a university degree.

A rigged game. Even the promise of equal opportunity is a myth, as elite universities remain playground preserves for the wealthy. True justice requires dismantling the tyranny of merit and recognizing that our achievements are deeply indebted to the collective community.

6. Introducing random selection in university admissions and legislative bodies can dismantle credentialist hierarchies.

But the main reason for the lottery is to change the meaning of admission, and to change the attitudes toward winning and losing that the frenzied system of admissions now encourages.

Dampening meritocratic hubris. Michael Sandel proposes a radical solution to the toxic admissions race: a lottery system for qualified applicants at elite universities. By choosing randomly from a pool of capable candidates, institutions can remind winners of the role of luck in their success.

Reclaiming legislative representation. This logic of sortition can be extended to reform representative governments and counter credentialist bias:

• Juries, chosen by lot, successfully decide matters of life and death, proving citizens' capacity for deliberation.
• A bicameral parliament could feature one house of elected officials and another composed of citizens chosen by lottery.
• This would break the monopoly of the university-educated class, who currently dominate legislative bodies despite being a minority of the population.

Descriptive representation. Alternatively, political systems can adopt targeted quotas, similar to India's reservation of constituencies for marginalized groups. Whether through lotteries or structural mandates, democracies must actively bring working-class voices back into the halls of power.

7. Historically proven, ultra-progressive tax rates on income and wealth are essential to compress social distance and fund public goods.

From 1930 to 1980, the top income tax rate was 82% on average.

A proven engine. Highly progressive taxation is not an economic hazard but a historical cornerstone of modern prosperity. During the mid-twentieth century, the United States and Europe experienced their highest rates of productivity and educational expansion while maintaining top tax rates above 80%.

Compressing social distance. Extreme wealth disparities destroy the social fabric by allowing the ultra-rich to buy the time and obedience of others. To restore human dignity, we must aggressively compress the income scale:

• Implement top tax rates of 80% to 90% on extreme incomes and inherited wealth.
• Establish robust minimum wages alongside maximum wage ratios (such as 1-to-5 or 1-to-10).
• Empower workers by giving them 50% of voting rights on corporate boards, regardless of capital share.

Restoring the contract. When the middle class suspects that the ultra-wealthy are evading their civic duties, the social contract unravels. Reintroducing progressive taxation reassures citizens that everyone is contributing their fair share to the public goods we all rely on.

8. We cannot sustain a welfare state without shared public spaces that force different social classes to mix and interact.

We need to build a civic infrastructure for a shared life where people encounter one another, whether in health clinics or in public transportation or in public parks and recreation areas, municipal facilities, public libraries, sports stadia even.

The secession of the affluent. Widening economic inequality has led to a physical separation of social classes. The wealthy have increasingly seceded from public life into private enclaves, leaving fewer opportunities for rich and poor to interact in daily life.

Class-mixing spaces. To rebuild solidarity, we must invest heavily in public spaces that foster inadvertent class mixing:

• Public libraries, parks, and municipal recreation centers that welcome all citizens.
• Reliable, clean public transportation systems used by people of all income levels.
• Community health clinics and public schools that serve diverse neighborhoods.

Reciprocal dependence. We cannot make a moral case for progressive taxation or a robust welfare state in a vacuum. Solidarity is built through the daily habits of shared citizenship, which remind us of our mutual responsibilities and common destiny.

9. Unilateral economic policies can force global compliance on tax and climate standards, bypassing the gridlock of rich-country clubs.

This is using universal criteria of social and environmental justice in order to define the conditions under which global economic integration can continue.

Unilateral leverage. Waiting for global unanimity on tax and climate policies is a recipe for permanent inaction. Piketty advocates for "universalist sovereignism," where individual nations unilaterally impose tariffs or tax adjustments on countries that engage in environmental or fiscal dumping.

Dismantling tax havens. The current international legal system is designed to let the wealthy transfer assets across borders with the press of a button. To counter this, nations must take bold, cooperative, and unilateral steps:

• Impose a minimum corporate tax rate and penalize trade from non-compliant jurisdictions.
• Establish a global registry of financial assets to track and tax billionaire wealth.
• Direct a portion of these tax revenues to the global South to fund green transitions.

Reconciling North and South. The global North's historical enrichment was built on the exploitation of Southern resources and labor, leaving a legacy of climate devastation. True internationalism requires a global tax on billionaires and multinationals to fund public goods and climate adaptation in the South.

10. The future of the left depends on honoring the dignity of work rather than telling the working class to get a degree to survive.

So credentialism is in a way the last acceptable prejudice.

The dignity of work. For decades, progressive politics has focused on individual upward mobility through higher education, effectively telling the working class to "get a degree or get left behind." This approach ignores the structural causes of inequality and inflicts a collective insult on those who perform essential manual and care labor.

Valuing non-academic contributions. We must shift our political focus from arming people for meritocratic competition to honoring the contributions of all workers:

• Rebalance public spending, which currently favors elite universities over vocational and technical training.
• Address the massive, unjustifiable pay gap between financial speculators and essential workers like teachers and nurses.
• Challenge the credentialist prejudice that excludes non-degree holders from political representation and social esteem.

A multidimensional struggle. The backlash against elites is not merely an economic grievance; it is a deeply felt struggle for recognition and respect. By centering the dignity of work, the left can build a powerful, inclusive coalition that transcends the divisive politics of cultural resentment.