One of the defining debates of the decade is about economic inequality, and it’s been gathering momentum in the US and Europe over the last few years. Movements like Occupy, activist Nobel prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, and writers and filmmakers have been ubiquitous, like in the NY Times, and many books and documentary films have gone mainstream—including, inter alia, Inside Job, Inequality for All, and We’re Not Broke.
The movement has been crowned by French economist, Thomas Piketty’s landmark work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which examines the evolution of inequality over the last few centuries of western society. But before getting to Piketty, and Trinidad, is an indispensable preamble: the British philosopher John Gray’s 1998 book, False Dawn, The Delusions of Global Capitalism.
False Dawn poses and answers crucial questions in the inequality debate: how is capitalism related to inequality? Does the world’s dominant economic system actually produce inequality? The answer to the second question is yes. But the answer to the first is a tour de force as Gray examines the dispersion and effects of the (US) free market capitalist ideology applied to societies as disparate as China, Germany, Russia, New Zealand and Japan.