CHAPTER 1 ‘Introduction’ provides a gentle introduction to what is a very complicated subject. It describes the growth of the winner-takes-all approach and how technology and globalisation have affected the pay of soccer players and others, and uses the English soccer player Wayne Rooney as an example to show the impact of this. The same factors that affect his pay have had economy-wide effects.
CHAPTER 2 ‘How Piketty created an industry’ looks at Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in detail. It also examines other approaches to inequality and shows that although the Piketty approach has some value, its single ‘conspiracy theory’ explanation is not even the main explanation of the recent rise in inequality, let alone the only one.
CHAPTER 3 ‘The three different types and four different causes of inequality’ digs deeper into the problem of contemporary inequality. It distinguishes between different types of inequality and shows that in reality there are at least four causes of rising inequality, rather than just the exploitation theory put forward by Piketty.
CHAPTER 4 ‘Why inequality matters’ looks into those aspects of inequality that are most damaging to society. There is sometimes a trade-off between inequality and poverty, so it is important to distinguish between problems caused by poverty and those caused by inequality.