84 | MAY 23 • 2024 
J
N

T

he most surprising 
bestselling book in 
2014 was French 
economist Thomas 
Piketty’s Capital in the 
Twenty-First Century — a 
dense 700-page-long treatise 
on economic 
theory backed 
by massive 
statistical 
research — not 
the usual stuff 
of runaway 
literary 
successes.
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 such as 
housing, stocks and bonds, 
where the top 1% have seen 
a growth of 300%, and the 
bottom fifth 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. 
Piketty’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. Those who own 
capital assets grow richer 
faster than those who rely 
entirely on income from 
their labor. 
The increase in inequality 

is, he says, “potentially 
threatening to democratic 
societies and to the values of 
social justice on which they 
are based.”
This is the latest chapter 
in a very old story indeed. 
Isaiah Berlin made the 
point that not all values 
can co-exist — 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 
of the Cold War era between 
capitalism and communism. 
Communism lost the battle. 
In the 1980s, under Ronald 
Reagan in America (Margaret 
Thatcher in Britain), markets 
were liberalized and, by the 
end of the decade, the Soviet 
Union had collapsed. But 
unfettered economic freedom 
produces its own discontents, 
and Piketty’s book is one of 
several warning signs.

COMMITMENT TO 
BOTH FREEDOM 
AND EQUALITY
All of this makes the social 
legislation of parshat Behar a 
text for our time because 
the Torah is profoundly 
concerned, not just with 
economics, but with the 
more fundamental moral and 
human issues. What kind of 
society do we seek? What 
social order best does justice 
to human dignity and the 
delicate bonds linking us to 
one another and to God?
What makes Judaism 
distinctive is its commitment 
to both freedom and equality, 
while at the same time 
recognizing the tension 
between them. The opening 
chapters of Genesis describe 
the consequences of God’s 
gift to humans of individual 
freedom. But since we are 
social animals, we need also 
collective freedom. Hence 
the significance of the 
opening chapters of Shemot, 
with their characterization 

 The 
Economics 
 of Liberty

Rabbi Lord 
Jonathan 
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

