Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2017
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/til-2017-0004
Abstract
Widespread recognition that economic inequality has been growing for forty years in most of the developed world, and in fact has tended to grow across most of the history of modern economies, shows that the period 1945-1973, when inequality of wealth and income shrank, was a marked anomaly in historical experience. At the time, however, the anomalous period of equality seemed to vindicate a long history of optimism about economic life: that growth would overcome meaningful scarcity and usher in an egalitarian and humanistic period that could almost qualify as post-economic. This has not been the experience of the last four decades. In this intellectual history of the anomalous period, we trace the main lines of that optimism and its undoing.
Disciplines
Law | Law and Economics
Recommended Citation
David S. Grewal & Jedediah S. Purdy,
Inequality Rediscovered,
18
Theoretical Inq. L.
61
(2017).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3205
Comments
The final publication is available at www.degruyter.com.