The Washington Post, January 4, 2024, ‘Equality’ Says The Path Has Always Been Fraught
In 2013, Barack Obama was flush with optimism as he stepped up to the podium to deliver his second inaugural address. He knew that America had a long way to go, but he believed that the country also had much to celebrate. Although the gender pay gap still yawned and racial injustice persisted, each year brought us closer to the realization of the principles enshrined in our founding documents. “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still,” Obama assured a cautiously hopeful nation.
But even as the president waxed if not quite poetic then at least enthusiastic about our long march toward equality, the French economist Thomas Piketty told a different and darker story. In “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” a surprise bestseller released in France in 2013 and translated into English a year later, he lamented that the rising tide had not lifted all boats. Instead, two centuries of capitalism had divided the haves from the have-nots with unprecedented cruelty. In the absence of targeted interventions, he warned, the gap between the prosperous and the penurious would continue to grow. America, the most unequal country in the developed world, would prove to be a particularly horrifying case in point. The Pew Research Center reported that, in 2018, “the highest-earning 20% of families made more than half of all U.S. income.”
