As Trump’s tax cut proposal proves, income inequality is rooted in our quest for simple truths

The idea that human beings should be equal is very old. The fight against inequality between French citizens and the royalty drove the 18th-century intellectual Rousseau to write “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”, sparking the French Revolution. In 1776, the newly independent United States of America wrote into its constitution, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, although neither women nor slaves were considered equal. Nevertheless, by the 21st century, the view that all men are equal was taken as a truism, even though, to quote Orwell, “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

A tale of three US Fed misfits and the growing wealth gap

There are meta-economic reasons why economic theory, which began as “political economy”, switched to “pure science”. By the 1980s, economics became normative and quantitative, using mathematical models borrowed from physics which assumed away messy politics, rationalising the world in elegant theories that focused on optimal policy solutions but ignored uncertainties such as financial crises and social inequities.

In China’s richest province, a yawning gap exists between the haves and the have-nots

The philosopher Stephen Toulmin categorised Western modernity (the rise of modern science) into three phases. The first was from 1436, when Gutenberg created typeset printing, to around 1650 which coincided with the discovery of America, the quest for trade with China after the loss of Constantinople, and the flowering of art, philosophy, literature and modern science.