Abstract
This chapter studies journalist Henry Mayhew’s critique of political economy and the exploitation of workers in Victorian-era London alongside economist Thomas Piketty’s analysis of global economic inequality in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In his serial edition of London Labour and the London Poor (1850–1852), Mayhew formulates an approach called “social economy” to contest theories of supply and demand as applied to labor, based on the concept of equity, a judgment combining fairness and equality. Although equity is not a keyword for Piketty, both his and Mayhew’s attempts to reorient economics toward questions of wealth distribution and social justice demonstrate an enduring project to reconceive the field as socially accountable. A distributional concept such as equity could invigorate interdisciplinary research and current public conversations on economic inequality.
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Notes
- 1.
All emphases appear in original unless otherwise noted.
- 2.
I have consulted the copy of Mayhew’s serial publication of London Labour and the London Poor held at the British Library. In his edition of selections from Mayhew’s correspondence, Taithe (1996) mentions having visited the Birmingham University Library, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Guildhall archives.
- 3.
- 4.
In his influential 1944 history of the emergence of the self-regulating market, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (2001, 172) describes in ways similar to Mayhew’s account how classical economics incentivized labor according to the ineluctable pressures of hunger and mere subsistence.
- 5.
Noel W. Thompson (1984, 39, 220) has shown that early nineteenth-century working-class political economists also criticized classical political economists for promulgating theories of “iniquity” and “inequity.” Their proposed “equitable” remedies were different from Mayhew’s recommendation of profit sharing because they advocated “refurbished exchange relations” (1984, 222–223) between capitalists and workers that would be derived from wages corresponding to natural values rather than market values.
- 6.
For a more extensive analysis of equity and friendship in law and nineteenth-century novels, see Winter (2016).
- 7.
Such rights are set out in the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1966) and many other similar national and international legal instruments. See https://ijrcenter.org/thematic-research-guides/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-2/.
- 8.
The adoption of equity as a principle for research is evident in the recently founded, non-profit Washington Center for Equitable Growth, which defines its mission as supporting “evidence-backed ideas and policies that promote strong, stable and broad-based economic growth,” including research on the detrimental impacts of economic inequality on growth, https://equitablegrowth.org/.
- 9.
Another goal of Piketty’s proposed global tax on capital is to “promote democratic and financial transparency” by “generat[ing] information about the distribution of wealth” (2014, 518).
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Winter, S. (2019). Equity. In: Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (eds) From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_11
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