Thomas Piketty’s recent book advocating equality is full of equations, most of which are either banal, irrelevant or wrong

What does “equality” really mean?

BY BRUCE ANDERSON

In the war of ideas, it is hard to win conclusive intellectual victories. Equality is a good example. In 1980, egalitarian socialism was firmly on the British political agenda. In the US, Jimmy Carter may not have proclaimed himself a socialist, but he did appear to have undermined his fellow Americans’ self-confidence. New Deal assumptions about the size and role of the state were still dominant. Then came Thatcher and Reagan.

Their approaches were different. He did not deal in ideology. Instead, he evoked traditions and values. A politician who could have made motherhood and apple pie sound like a brilliantly original insight, he reminded Americans of their heritage: their right to self-help in a land full of opportunity.

Confronted by explicitly socialist – indeed Marxist – opponents, Margaret Thatcher adopted a different approach. Many Europeans, and a fair few Brits, believed in moral and intellectual appeasement and were ready to acquiesce in the Left’s command of the moral high ground. Mrs Thatcher was having none of that. With a much more combative personality – President Reagan himself sometimes felt the weight of her handbag – she eschewed emollience.

That was especially true over equality. Whether it was high tax rates, which she cut, or intellectual fashion, which she repudiated, she took the war to the enemy. She insisted that you do not make the poor rich by making the rich poor. She pointed out that the Good Samaritan was only able to help the victim because he had money in his pocket. One of the volumes of her speeches was entitled “Let Our Children Grow Tall”. Suddenly, the entrepreneurially-minded British realised that they no longer had to emigrate in order to make their fortunes.

A decade of Reaganite/Thatcherite success culminated in the fall of the Soviet Union. Even Lefties who would have indignantly protested against any suggestion that they were fellow-travellers had taken political comfort from the thought that, however imperfectly, a large proportion of the globe was building socialism and was entitled to claim moral equivalence with the West, if not indeed moral superiority. To be fair, they were not fellow-travellers – merely useful idiots. Anyway, the idiocy was suddenly exposed as fantasy. The isms became wasms.

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