We'll never be royals, but that doesn't matter.

• Author: Carden, Art
• Position: Essay

The poor we have always had with us. We worry about the fact that some people are poor in an absolute sense--lacking access to food, clothing, and shelter--far more than we worry that some people simply have less than others. Pick any point in history, and you will find unequal material standards of living. Pick a time in the past two or three centuries, though, and you will notice an important difference: where most inequality was before that point between people in the same society, an enormous gulf thereafter opened between members of different societies (Deaton 2013, 168). The gap between the rich and the poor in Europe and its overseas extensions narrowed as more and more people were able to enjoy what to their ancestors had been luxuries. The process was already evident when Adam Smith was writing of "the industrious and frugal peasant" in 1776: "Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages" ([1776] 1981, 23-24). We would obviously use different language today, but Smith points to a stubborn and persistent fact. Even the "poor" in wealthy countries are fantastically wealthy by global standards.

The differences in "accommodation" between rich-by-Western-standards and poor-by-Western-standards westerners does not concern us nearly as much as the differences between rich-by-global-standards westerners and their poor-by-any-standard brothers and sisters in different countries. Instead of asking, for example, "Why are some Americans richer than other Americans?" the question is "Why are Europeans and Americans so much richer than almost everyone else?" The Great Fact discussed by Deirdre McCloskey (2006, 2010, 2016) is the enrichment of ordinary people in European societies and their overseas offshoots, with prosperity spreading, as evident in rising per capita income around the globe and the development of a global middle class. The global middle class is growing; poverty in Africa is falling (Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin 2009). The Enrichment, emerging from the unevenly and imperfectly realized conviction that people are equal morally or politically, made us more equal materially.

The gap between very rich Americans and Americans who are poor relative to their own society's "haves" (but spectacularly wealthy relative to both the vast majority of those who came before them and most of the world's population today) is not, we think, as important as the gap between the average member of a wealthy society and the average member of a poor society. Given the choice between eliminating absolute poverty (holding inequality constant) and eliminating inequality (holding poverty constant), we would end poverty. If poverty, not inequality, is what stands between some people and the opportunity to flourish, the concern over income inequality per se is misplaced. If alleviating absolute poverty is our objective, the moral and legal equality that made the Enrichment possible should be our priority, not equalizing material standards of living.

Industrialization, Not Redistribution, Created First-World Problems

We are converging on an enrichment of the poor.

--Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality

There is no entry for equality in the Syntopicon of the Britannica series Great Books of the Western World, though it is said general editor Mortimer Adler later regretted it. This isn't to say the ancients weren't seriously concerned with equality. Plato understood that the distribution of material well-being is important to social stability, even going so far as to say in The Laws that funeral expenditures for the richest must be no more than five times what is spent on the poorest (book XII). Aristotle took more of a justice approach and said that imposing equality upon that which is naturally unequal is unjust. However, a closer look at the Politics (VII:3) reveals that he also was concerned by the granting of unequal treatment to those that are equal. That is, Aristotle was not an inequality sceptic. Although modern scholars have traditionally exercised great care in distinguishing between equality of opportunity, equality of consumption, and equality of outcome, most colloquial uses of the term inequality refer to unequal statistical distributions of income and wealth.

Inequality has always been an important topic in economics, and new data and methods are helping us fill in historical gaps in our understanding of it. Esteban Nicolini and Fernando Ramos Palencia (2016), for example, assemble mid-eighteenth-century census data to estimate inequality for Spain; where previous approaches had used proxies, they are able to provide estimates using income data. Metin Cosgel and Bogac Ergene (2012) construct estimates for the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire using probate inventories. There was rising inequality in Kastamonu, where they get their data, just as there was rising inequality in Europe. Relative decline in wages combined with capital concentration meant rising inequality in the Southern Low Countries in the lead-up to industrialization (Ryckbosch 2016, 17). Religion and estate division practices influenced economic inequality in Canada at the beginning of the twentieth century (Di Matteo 2016). These are just a few examples of how we are coming to better understand the causes and consequences of historical inequality.

Joseph Molitoris and Martin Dribe document persistent inequality in mortality outcomes in Stockholm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; however, they caution readers not to lose sight of the fact that there were still large absolute gains in absolute standards of living, such as child mortality, even though gaps persisted: "The working classes saw more of...