Narrator: What if the romantic dilemmas in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice were not just about love and social status, but could be calculated as a precise economic trade-off? Imagine Elizabeth Bennet weighing her options, knowing that marrying the wealthy Mr. Darcy would give her an income 100 times greater than the average English person of her time. Now, what if we could apply that same economic lens to the entire sweep of human history, from the fortunes of Roman senators to the wealth of modern billionaires, to understand the fundamental story of who has what and why?

This is the fascinating journey presented in Branko Milanovic’s book, The Haves and the Have-Nots. It moves beyond dry statistics to tell the story of inequality through vivid historical vignettes, literary analysis, and powerful data. The book reveals that the gap between the rich and poor is not a static feature of society but a dynamic force that has been shaped by revolutions, wars, politics, and the very structure of our global economy.

Narrator: For centuries, thinking about inequality meant thinking about social classes. Economists like David Ricardo saw society as a contest between workers, capitalists, and landlords. The crucial question was how the economic pie was divided among these groups. But in the early 20th century, this perspective began to change. The rise of income tax and the availability of new data allowed economists like Vilfredo Pareto to look past broad classes and focus on the distribution of income among individuals.

Milanovic uses Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, set in early 19th-century England, to illustrate this world of individual and family-based inequality. The drama of the Bennet sisters is driven by the stark economic realities of their time. Their family’s comfortable but not extravagant income placed them in the top sliver of society, yet they were acutely aware of the vast wealth of suitors like Mr. Darcy. His fortune was so immense that it placed him among the top 0.1% of the population. The novel isn't about a struggle between workers and aristocrats; it’s about the high-stakes game of marriage and money played between individuals within the same elite class. This shift in focus, from class to individual, allows for a more granular understanding of inequality, but as Milanovic shows, it also sets the stage for new and even larger disparities to emerge on a different scale.

Narrator: Before the Industrial Revolution, the economic differences between countries were relatively small. In 1820, the richest nations like Great Britain were perhaps only three times wealthier than the poorest, like China. Most of humanity lived at or near subsistence level. But the Industrial Revolution shattered this relative parity. It ignited an engine of growth in Western Europe and North America that left the rest of the world far behind.

This created what Milanovic calls the "great divergence." Over the next two centuries, the gap between nations exploded. Today, the income ratio between the richest and poorest countries is not three to one, but more than one hundred to one. This means that a person's country of birth has become a more significant determinant of their economic fate than their social class within that country.

To grasp these vast differences, economists developed a tool called Purchasing Power Parity, or PPP. Instead of just converting currencies, they meticulously compare the prices of over 1,000 goods and services—from bread to haircuts to housing—to understand what a person's income can actually buy in their local context. This allows for a true "apples-to-apples" comparison, revealing the staggering real-world gaps in living standards that now define our world.

Narrator: For the first time in history, thanks to comprehensive household survey data from across the globe, we can now measure inequality not just within or between nations, but among all citizens of the world as if they lived in a single country. Milanovic explains that when we take this global view, the level of inequality is higher than in any single nation on Earth. The global Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, stands at around 70—a level considered socially and politically unsustainable within any one country.

The story of this global inequality is one of powerful, counteracting forces. On one hand, inequality within many countries, including the US and China, has been rising. On the other hand, the phenomenal economic growth of China and India has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, reducing the gap between them and the rich world. Milanovic notes that since the 1980s, these two forces have roughly canceled each other out, keeping overall global inequality high but stable.

This global perspective reveals a stark reality: the world’s richest 1% are overwhelmingly citizens of Western countries. Nearly half of the world's richest 60 million people live in the United States. Meanwhile, the world’s poorest are almost entirely from Asia and Africa. The gap is immense: the top 10% of the world's population receives 56% of total global income, while the bottom 10% receives less than 1%.

Narrator: The extreme income gaps between countries create a fundamental tension in our interconnected world. Milanovic frames this as the "globalization trilemma," a puzzle where we can have any two of three conditions, but never all three at once. The three conditions are: first, a globalized world with free movement of capital, goods, and ideas; second, vast income differences between countries; and third, strict controls on labor migration.

This trilemma explains many of the political and social pressures of our time. As long as a person can multiply their real income by ten times or more simply by crossing a border, the pressure for migration will be immense. The book argues that this situation is ultimately unstable. The consequences of poverty in one part of the world no longer stay contained. For example, state collapse and poverty in Somalia didn't just create a local humanitarian crisis; it spawned piracy that threatened global shipping routes.

This leaves the world with a stark choice. To maintain a globalized system, one of the other two conditions must change. Either the incomes of people in poor countries must rise dramatically, closing the gap with the rich world, or rich countries must be prepared to accommodate much greater levels of migration. Ignoring this choice, Milanovic suggests, is not a sustainable option.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Haves and the Have-Nots is that the nature of inequality has fundamentally changed. For most of history, the primary determinant of a person's wealth was their class position within their own society. Today, it is their citizenship. Where a person is born is now the single most powerful factor in their economic destiny.

Milanovic leaves us with a challenging final thought, encapsulated in the globalization trilemma. We live in a world that celebrates global integration while simultaneously trying to maintain huge national income disparities and fortified borders. This is a contradiction that cannot hold. The book forces us to ask a critical question: In a world so interconnected, can we truly afford to let the lottery of birth decide so much for so long? The answer to that question will define the politics, economics, and moral landscape of the 21st century.