focuses on egalitarianism, feminism, and radical democracy. They are Coordinator of the Real Utopias Project and their recent books include Part-Time for All: A Care Manifesto (with Jennifer Nedelsky) and After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century. They are also a longtime social justice activist and organizer.
Malleson applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich, and reported the following:
The top of page 99 looks at the question of whether it’s really true that if we placed high taxes on the rich, they would immediately quit their jobs, or work significantly less (spoiler: the evidence is pretty clear that they actually wouldn’t! Most rich people are motivated by status and power just as much as the money). The bottom of the page shifts gears to talk about whether high taxes will harm productivity and investment. Here, the crucial thing to realize is that it’s wrong to think about taxation as simply taking money out of the economy, because in most cases that money will be spent by the government somewhere else, with positive benefits for the economy. This means that “from the perspective of an individual or a corporation, a tax will always feel like a cost and a burden, but for the country as a whole, a tax is better thought of not as a cost but as an internal transfer.”Visit Tom Malleson's website.
The Page 99 Test gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about. The reader will see a mixture of compelling statistics alongside interesting discussion of vital issues about why inequality is so high, why taxes on the rich are so low, and what we can - and should - do to change things.
Although the Page 99 Test succeeds in giving the reader a good flavour of the book, unsurprisingly it only gives a very thin slice of all the big issues that are covered. Against Inequality: The Practical and Ethical Case for Abolishing the Superrich covers a lot of ground – we analyze the major practical arguments that are typically offered in defence of inequality (such as the idea that it’s not possible to have high taxes because the rich will always avoid them through tax havens or emigration, and the idea that even if it were possible to implement high taxes, it would be a bad idea to do so because the costs would outweigh any benefits). We also look at the major ethical justifications of inequality, particularly the idea that rich people “deserve” their income from their hard work and talent. All of these arguments are found to be deeply and utterly wrong. In fact, the book demonstrates that inequality is profoundly unjust and undeserved, and furthermore, that it’s entirely feasible to dramatically reduce inequality. Overall, the evidence is overwhelming that reducing inequality would make us all far better off. We can and we should abolish the superrich.
--Marshal Zeringue
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