Ed Howker

Getting the balance right

Branko Milanovic is the lead economist at the World Bank’s research department, a professor at the University of Maryland and a grand fromage at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace too.

issue 26 February 2011

Branko Milanovic is the lead economist at the World Bank’s research department, a professor at the University of Maryland and a grand fromage at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace too.

Branko Milanovic is the lead economist at the World Bank’s research department, a professor at the University of Maryland and a grand fromage at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace too. He is not, it turns out, a very light-hearted man and that’s a particular misfortune because The Haves and the Have-Nots was clearly designed to be the easy-reading version of his far more weighty tome on global inequality, Worlds Apart.

The structure of this latest work is idiosyncratic — taking a short but dense history of inequality and interspersing it with some exercises in virtuosic statistical research which are self-consciously flippant: in which 13th-century Parisian arrondissement would it be preferable to live? Who was the richest man in the history of the world? How wealthy was Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy?

Some of these vignettes, offered almost as politenesses before the serious discussion gets going, are ponderous, condescending and ultimately pointless.

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