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. The section on Darcy begins infuriatingly: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice is a novel about love. It is less universally acknowledged that it is a novel about money, too.’ Nonsense! Everyone knows that the book is all about spondulicks; even the well-worn quotation Milanovic pastiches revolves around the ‘possession of a good fortune’. Would you believe it, I ploughed through his cost-benefit analysis of Lizzie Bennet’s love-life, only to discover that the author’s conclusion is even more asinine: ‘One would really have to hate Mr Darcy to reject the deal he is tacitly offering.’ Good grief.
Happily for readers, these vignettes — there are about two dozen in all — are clearly labelled and mercifully short, so you can readily skip the most unpromising.
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