Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn

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Reviewed by: Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World by Samuel Moyn Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann (bio) Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780674737563, pages. xii, 277. I. THE ARGUMENT This fascinating and erudite volume is an intellectual history with an agenda. The history is of the idea of equality. The agenda is to persuade human rights activists [End Page 515] and scholars to pay more attention to contemporary world inequality. Samuel Moyn would like lessened inequality, though he does not specify precisely what level of inequality he could tolerate, or how he hopes that level could be achieved. Only in his conclusion does he state that material equality means "a ceiling on the wealth gap between rich and poor."1 Perhaps inadvertently, he does not include income inequality in his definition, yet it is now a major contributor to inequality as a whole.2 In 2015, the chief economist of the World Bank noted that the annual income alone of the world's fifty richest people (excluding wealth) approached the total income of the poorest one billion people.3 Moyn's central empirical claim is that the world is presently experiencing enduring and exploding inequality.4 Although he cites in passing some of the more recent books by economists on inequality, he does not distinguish, as they do, between its different types, noting only "the explosion of inequality in many nations and (by some measures) globally too."5 In fact, it appears that inequality among states is decreasing; rich and poor countries are converging, with the rich countries' share of worldwide income declining since 1970.6 The average standard of living in Germany or France in the mid-1990s was twenty times as high as in India or China: by 2015 it was only ten times as high.7 Given that Moyn's central ethical concern is the human rights community's lack of concern with global inequality, it is surprising that he does not note this decline in inequality among states. Nor does he note that inequality among all individuals of the world is declining.8 Only intrastate inequality is increasing, in many but not all countries. Moyn does accept that poverty has been reduced worldwide, especially in China, but he does not seem to think much of this reduction as long as inequality grows.9 He is concerned about the "new political economy of hierarchy,"10 as this writer also is, but there have always been political economies of hierarchy, based on status, power, influence or privilege as much as on capitalist marketplaces. Socialist societies were stratified by all these non-marketplace mechanisms, even as formal income distribution was flattened and accumulation of wealth largely prohibited. As it is not the case that all types of inequality are growing, it is not clear that the increasing inequality will endure. One reason that there has been more intrastate inequality since about 1980 is that the artificially flattened communist economies of China and the Soviet Union/Soviet Bloc have opened up to capitalism. Another may be that as poorer economies develop, they experience [End Page 516] what is known as the Kuznets inequality curve. Inequality increases, then levels off and decreases in an inverted U-shape.11 Thus, in some developing economies, we might expect less inequality in coming decades, depending in part on what tax policies and redistributive measures national governments adopt, just as the extent of inequality depends on such policies among developed countries. Canada, for example, is significantly less unequal than the US, despite having a similar economic system and despite the economic intertwining of their two economies.12 On the other hand, the intensified plutocracy and kleptocracy we now witness not only in "southern" countries, but also in the US, does indeed suggest that extremely high rates of inequality may well endure. The extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of approximately 1,400 billionaires, who in 2013 held two per cent of the world's wealth, twice as much as held by the entire continent of Africa, is obscene.13 Moyn is concerned by the fact that the expansion of...