“For a sustainable society, social and environmental inequality issues must be resolved.
“This book not only shows that these two problems can and must be solved together, but also offers a fresh perspective on the solution.” -Thomas Piketty

Financial Times Book of the Year
Strongly recommended by Thomas Piketty and Bruno Latour

Economic inequality and the environmental crisis are deeply intertwined!
How can we achieve social justice and environmental justice simultaneously?

Income and wealth inequality leads to educational inequality and inequality in cultural access, which in turn triggers social division and conflict.
In recent years, worrying situations have emerged in many countries around the world as economic inequality has translated into political polarization and extreme political populism.
Meanwhile, the climate crisis has long been a present tense rather than a future one, with extreme weather events such as heat waves, cold waves, droughts, floods, and wildfires occurring frequently around the globe.
The fact that disasters caused by the climate crisis cause greater suffering to the poor is also confirmed time and time again in reality.


But the response to these two huge threats – economic inequality and ecological crisis – has so far been carried out on separate levels.
"Unsustainable Inequality" emphasizes that the question of "how to escape the ecological crisis" must be addressed alongside the question of "how to overcome inequality," and points out that reducing inequality is the core of the "ecological transition plan."
This book, which is evaluated to combine the quantitative research of an economist with the argumentative sophistication of a philosopher, is being introduced for the first time in Korea in the 2021 revised and expanded edition, which has revised and supplemented the 2017 first edition with the latest data.
Lucas Chancel, who has emerged as a world-class star economist by making bold arguments, is working at the World Inequality Institute along with other leading economists including Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zuckman, and is also a senior advisor to the World Inequality Database (WID.world), a project that builds data to measure wealth inequality.


When we talk about inequality, we often think of income inequality or asset inequality.
However, environmental inequality is just as serious as socioeconomic inequality, although we are not aware of it.
Chancel traces the deepening of economic inequality since the 20th century and examines its impact on various sectors of society from various angles, then analyzes energy consumption and carbon emissions by income level at the national and continental levels.
This confirms that economic inequality and environmental destruction create a vicious cycle, which in turn suggests that policies that harmonize the two goals are entirely possible.
Chancel compares and analyzes various social and environmental policies and implementation cases, including progressive tax policies, environmental taxes, large-scale infrastructure improvements, energy cooperatives, and transition village movements, in various countries, to explore ways to create a just and sustainable society.

Environmental destruction is often thought of as a harm that the present generation inflicts on future generations, but it actually deepens social inequality and reinforces existing imbalances within a single generation.
While no one is immune to the risks associated with chemical pollution, such as those in the United States or India, that doesn't mean everyone is exposed to the same risks.
The nature of environmental and economic inequality is virtually a vicious cycle.
Indeed, whether in the global North or the global South, the wealthiest are less exposed to environmental risks (pollution, climate disasters, natural resource price instability, etc.) than the poor.
Moreover, the poor suffer much greater damage from environmental disasters.
This is because the poor have little means to prepare and defend themselves in advance, and little means to recover and get back on their feet after the damage has been done.
We saw such a tragic example vividly when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.
Rich and poor people did not have the same resilience to environmental damage.
The injustice aggravated by environmental inequality automatically reinforces socioeconomic inequality.
The deterioration of health due to pollution and the destruction of livelihoods due to environmental disasters push the poorest into even worse conditions, thereby increasing inequality through a phenomenon that can be called the "environmental poverty trap."
Adding to this vicious cycle is the injustice of responsibility for environmental destruction.
It is difficult to say that beyond a certain income level, there is room to reduce pollution.
Although some scholars are raising objections, it is a story that seems to come out of a fairy tale.
With very few exceptions, the wealthiest people generally leave the largest environmental footprints.

---From the "Introductory Note"

As politics becomes more reliant on private donations, candidates who appeal to the wealthy upper class are more likely to win elections.
Thus, the democratic ideal of 'one person, one vote' gradually becomes blurred and becomes 'one dollar, one vote'.
Such a situation can perpetuate political and economic inequality, and such inequality itself tends to polarize political activity.
According to a fascinating work by three American political scientists, the more inequality there is, the more polarized political life becomes, making it all the more difficult to reduce it.
…even as inequality grows, the wealthiest have no objective reason to support policies that reduce inequality (such policies would require them to pay more in taxes).
Because of this, the US Republican Party's position has shifted to the right.
The three researchers also showed what role immigration has played since the 1970s.
Immigration has greatly increased the number of poor, politically uneducated, or non-voting American citizens.
So it is natural that the political forces opposing redistribution have grown larger than the political forces in favor of it.

---From "Chapter 1: Is Economic Inequality the Reason for Unsustainability?"

In a world of unequal economic growth, the living standards of low-income earners stagnate, while the incomes of the wealthy increase.
To maintain consumption levels (consumption is one of the driving forces of growth), public authorities encourage lending to low-income households by instilling in them the idea that real estate values ​​will continue to rise.
Meanwhile, the wealthy on the other side of the pyramid lend money to the financial markets that they don't spend (where else would they spend money when they bought three houses and a yacht...) and fuel the real estate bubble and price surge.
But such a surge cannot continue indefinitely, as the ability of low-income households to pay does not actually increase.

---From "Chapter 1: Is Economic Inequality the Reason for Unsustainability?"

Thorstein Veblen observed that the more unequal a society becomes, the more people tend to consume conspicuous goods in order to differentiate themselves and keep up with others.
Samuel Bowles and Park Yong-jin showed that the most unequal societies are also those with the longest annual working hours.
Specifically, if inequality in the United States were at the same level as Sweden (according to data from the early 1990s), Americans would work 10 percent fewer hours.
10 percent is by no means a negligible number.
The two authors explain this result with the 'Veblen effect'.
In an unequal society, people tend to work harder to keep up with the lifestyles of those they envy.
---From "Chapter 1: Is Economic Inequality the Reason for Unsustainability?"

The same goes for CO2e emissions resulting from energy consumption.
In fact, there is a limit to the number of calories we need per day and the amount of fuel we can fill our cars with (even those who own multiple cars cannot drive them all at once).
On the other hand, there is virtually no limit to the amount of goods and services that can be purchased with income.
Luxury cars that sit in their garages all day do not emit CO2e directly, but the CO2e generated by their design and construction must be taken into account when calculating the owner's indirect CO2e emissions.
Therefore, indirect emissions are more closely correlated with income than direct emissions.
The wealthier an individual is, the greater the share of indirect emissions.
French and American citizens, who are in the top 20 percent of income earners, account for three-quarters of their total indirect emissions.
In contrast, in the bottom 20 percent of income earners, indirect emissions account for about two-thirds.

---From "Chapter 5: Inequality of Responsibility for Public Harm"

The French government attempted to introduce a carbon tax in 2008.
This attempt was never realized and was abandoned due to opposition from both left-wing and right-wing politicians who argued that it was socially unjust.
And a few years later, in 2014, the government of François Hollande finally succeeded in introducing a carbon tax.
Why did one government succeed just a few years later when another failed? The secret is that in the first year of introducing a carbon tax, the rate per ton was close to zero.
Thanks to this, the measure passed unnoticed.
Energy experts and environmentalists praised the Hollande government's clever tactics, believing the carbon tax could be raised gradually over time.


How many people would have imagined that such social unrest would occur after that? Carbon taxes were raised as expected, but in the meantime, compensation mechanisms for low-income and middle-class households were not sufficiently established, and no investment was made in the energy transition.
Millions of households have no alternatives to reducing their carbon emissions from transportation or heating.
Raising taxes without financial compensation only fueled their discontent.
Things finally came to a head in 2018.
This is because the Emmanuel Macron government has announced that it will raise the carbon tax as part of its tax reform plan that abolishes the solidarity tax on assets and lowers the tax rate on capital gains.
That year, tax revenues from the top income brackets fell by €4 billion, while the carbon tax, which disproportionately burdens low- and middle-income households, increased by just €4 billion.


The French government claimed that the tax system had been reformed to benefit both the environment and low-income earners, but the actual statistics show otherwise.
The top 1 percent saw their incomes rise by more than 6 percent as a result of the tax reform (even the top 0.1 percent saw a 20 percent increase), but the bottom 20 percent ended up paying more in taxes, primarily because of the carbon tax.

---From "Chapter 6: Reducing Inequality in a Finite World"