The thing about neoliberalism is that it’s a machine for producing and amplifying inequality. In other words, inequality is not a regrettable and inevitable byproduct of an otherwise admirable economic doctrine: it’s what the system is designed to do. Or, as programmers would say, it’s a feature, not a bug.

Hot on the heels of Thomas Piketty come two terrific books. Tony Atkinson has been studying inequality for decades, and his new book challenges the conventional wisdom that there’s nothing we can do about rising inequality. He sets out a comprehensive set of policies that could bring about a real shift in income distribution in developed countries. To reduce inequality, he says, we need to go beyond taxing the wealthy (though we should also do that). Atkinson thinks we need new ideas in four other areas: technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital. If I had to summarise the book in a phrase, I’d say it was the embodiment of informed optimism.

Joe Stiglitz has been writing about inequality for ages too, and his new book is a set of essays that expand on the diagnosis he proposed in an earlier best-seller, The Price of Inequality. Like Atkinson, Stiglitz thinks that we could reduce inequality if we were smart and determined enough. The conventional neoliberal wisdom which says that we have to choose between economic growth and fairness is, he thinks, bunkum. I agree. Trouble is, none of our politicians do.

Like many people, I’m puzzled by Hilary Clinton. I thought she was a good US Secretary of State. But I’ve been suspicious of her preparations to run for the presidency, which looks awfully like a formulaic enterprise from an operating manual laid down two decades ago. And she’s clearly the Democratic Establishment’s candidate. But I’ve no idea what she’s like as a person, which is why this piece by Bertrand-Henry Lévy (who has met her three times) is interesting. Especially this bit:

Sometimes her expression is briefly clouded by a streak of stifled pain, obstinate and not wholly contained. Five years earlier, she was the most humiliated wife in America, a woman whose private life was thrown open – fully and relentlessly – to public scrutiny. So she can talk national and international politics until she is blue in the face. She can sing the praises of John Kerry, whom her party has just nominated in an effort to deny George W. Bush a second term. And she can expound on her role as the junior senator from New York. Still, there persists an idea that I cannot push out of my head, and that I enter into the travel journal that I am writing for The Atlantic.

The idea is this: to avenge her husband and to take revenge on him, to wash away the stain on the family and show what an unblemished Clinton administration might look like, this woman will sooner or later be a candidate for the presidency of the United States. This idea brings to mind Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, published a year after the Senate acquitted her husband of perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges, with its searing portrait of how indelible even an undeserved blot on one’s reputation can be. She will strive to enter the Oval Office – the theater of her inner, outer, and planetary misery – on her own terms. And the most likely outcome, my article will conclude, is that she will succeed.