The Economics of Liberty. The most surprising best-selling book in 2014 was French economist Thomas

Piquetti's capital in the 21st century, a dense 600-page-long treatise on economic theory,

backed by massive statistical research, not the usual stuff of runaway literary success. Much of its appeal

was the way it documented the phenomenon that is reshaping societies throughout the world. In the

current global economy, inequalities are growing apace. In the United States, between 1979 and 2013, the top 1% saw their incomes grow

by more than 240% while the lowest fifth experienced a rise of only 10%. More striking still

is the difference in capital income from assets like housing, stocks and bonds,

where the top 1% have seen a growth of 300% and the bottom 5th have suffered a fall of 60%.

In global terms, the combined wealth of the richest 85 individuals is equal to the total of the poorest 3.5 billion, half the

population of the world. Piquetti's contribution was to show why this has happened. The market

economy, he argues, tends to make us more and less equal at the same time, more equal, because it spreads

education, knowledge and skills more widely than in the past, but less equal because over time,

especially in mature economies, the rate of return on capital tends to outpace the rate of growth of income and output. In other words,

those who own capital assets grow richer, faster than those who rely entirely on income

from their labor. The increase in equality, he says, is potentially threatening to democratic

societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.

Now this is the latest chapter in a very old story indeed.

Isaiah Berlin made the point that not all values can coexist, in this case freedom and equality. You can have one or the other, but not both.

The more economic freedom, the less equality. The more equality, the less freedom.

That was the key conflict in the Cold War era between capitalism and communism.

Communism lost the battle in the 1980s era between capitalism and communism. Communism lost the battle.

In the 1980s under Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain,

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