“The Political Origins of Inequality makes the bold claim that popular thinking on global development is profoundly and fundamentally flawed because many of the economists who have written many of the best sellers have often been shortsighted. This is an important book about big issues, dismissive of facile solutions, it should change the terms of the debate on why the gaps between us are so wide and what we could do about them.”
— Danny Dorling, author of Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists
“An important reminder that the historical origins of today’s crushing burden of global and national inequality are political, and so too must be the solutions.”
— Duncan Green, head of research, Oxfam GB
“Reid-Henry has mapped the terrain of our current political landscape with frightening accuracy. From this cartography, he points the way forward: we need a politics that prioritises social prosperity over economic growth. We need to reinvent the social democratic project ‘at home and abroad’—including a global institutional system to mediate effectively between existing public and international law. We must do the hard work of ‘joining up the dots…of a far too patchy, far too easily manipulated institutional framework that governs the lives of the rich and poor around the world but does not govern them alike.’”
— Times Higher Education, Book of the Week
“Back around the time of World War I, observes Reid-Henry, the richest 20 percent of the world’s population earned 11 times the income of the poorest 20 percent. Some four score years later, the world’s most affluent fifth was grabbing 74 times as much. This exploding divide . . . didn’t have to happen. Political decisions, not natural disasters or economic iron laws, are driving inequality ever wider, and Reid-Henry guides us through these decisions with grace and grit.”
— Too Much
“A hopeful reckoning of neoliberalism’s disjunctures and a boldly democratic vision.”
— Economic Geography