A Piggy Bank Puzzle

The past several years have seen an uptick in books warning that growing economic disparity in rich countries is a major and immediate concern. From Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats and, especially, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to Bernie Sanders’s It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism, such books argue that rising income gaps and wealth concentration among an increasingly small super-elite are immoral, bad for democracy, and socially destabilizing. Tom Malleson’s Against Inequality picks up where those other titles left off and offers a road map, of sorts, for dealing with this dilemma.

Against Inequality promotes a position the author calls Good Life Egalitarianism: “All people, regardless of their skills or efforts, should be guaranteed the essential goods necessary to live a good and flourishing life.” While the book devolves...