Global Equality by Design

Abstract This chapter introduces to a new intellectual history of global inequality. Whereas a prevailing narrative says inequality was a marginalized topic in much of twentieth century economic thought, this book is about thinkers who were in fact deeply concerned with rising national and global inequalities, and who sounded alarm bells for decades. Concerned with how global equality could be promoted through international political instruments, they were trying to craft a global equality regime. With various affiliations with the United Nations—an international organization that early on produced new statistics on an unequal world—they operated within global egalitarian norms (i.e., ideals of greater equality between both rich and poor nations and between rich and poor individuals). Tracing this history of ideas, this book contributes to several historiographies: inequality, the UN, development, the history of international relations theory, the role of business in society, and neoliberalism.