Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West.DanielWaldenström, (Polity Press, 2024. Pp. 256. ISBN 9781509557783. Hbk £25)

The economic history of inequality has received famous treatments of late, elevating the subject to a broader popular consciousness.Break out hits include Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014), Scheidel (The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, 2017), and recently Alfani (As Gods Among Men: A New History of Inequality, 2024).However, there is a certain pessimistic take in all three.A sense that inequality is intrinsically corrupt, it can only decline with violence and the super-rich are becoming somewhat parasitic.Offering a more optimistic take is Daniel Waldenstrm's new book, Richer and More Equal.In it, he argues that we have all failed to fully appreciate the good news of the twentieth century.The rise of average wealth has been accompanied by a "Great Wealth Equalization" driven by rising middle class wealth in housing and pensions.This claim is evidenced by carefully aggregated data from a set of countries representing "the West", including the United Kingdom, United States, France, and Waldenstrm's extensive scholarly work on his native Sweden.The book summarizes the empirical trends clearly and concisely and introduces the nonspecialist to the frontier of the inequality literature through 10 neat and contained chapters.The writing is fluid and energetic throughout.The positive message the book makes is perhaps not a message everyone is primed to accept.This reviewer recalls an unpleasant interview with a journalist fishing for an academic condemnation of Elon Musk's wealth, who dismissed the longrun great decline in inequality as irrelevant to their immediate argument(/biases).We need more positive interpretations of the great equalization of the twentieth century.Waldenstrm makes this his target: "Uncovering a Positive Story" in chapter 1.In the next two chapters he grounds his narrative in the empirical record, updated with knowledgeable references to key debates and recent controversies.Chapter 4 develops his key arguments on housing and (funded) pension wealth accumulation.Chapters 5 and 6 offer a detailed and comprehensive deep dive into the past 130 years of wealth inequality in the West.The next three chapters explore different specific aspects of wealth inequality and its change over time: hidden offshore wealth (chapter 7), public sector wealth (chapter 8), and inheritance (chapter 9).Some policy recommendations wrap up the relatively short (but highly information dense across its 200 pages or so) book.