In some influential circles egalitarian policies are seen as a serious handicap to the economy and a perilous ‘moral gamble’: a certain amount of inequality, the argument runs, is necessary to guarantee economic development. According to this view, a high degree of pollution is acceptable at the beginning because it will disappear when standards of living rise and technologies improve. But there is no sign of that yet: inequalities have continued to widen, the global economic crisis is very serious and the condition of the world environment continues to deteriorate.
Piece by piece, Marco Revelli dismantles the hardware of the neo-liberal ideology, which is based on a few simplistic dogmas: misuse of the so-called ‘Kuznets curve’, whose inventor drew on an analysis of industrial growth to argue that a phase of increasing inequalities would be followed by a more egalitarian one; recourse to the ‘Laffer curve’ to propose reducing the yield of taxes by increasing taxation; and in general, support for a redistribution in reverse of income, favouring those at the top of the social pyramid, on the principle that sooner or later something will ‘trickle’ down (the trickle-down theory).
The book shows how, on the contrary, inequalities continue to rise, doing serious harm to the economy; indeed, that the origin of the current devastating economic crisis lies in a toxic distribution of resources which concentrates the equivalent of the wealth of three million inhabitants of the world in the hands of eighty-five super-rich people.