The Inequality Machine
How can it be that the wealth of a handful of people exceeds that of half the world’s population, and why is this obscene concentration of riches not ridiculed out of existence? Questions that matter. Critical research into the mainstays of inequality is essential, even in the light of the greatest challenge of our time, climate change.
Paul Goossens is to our journalism what Hugo Claus was to our literature: unique, passionate, irreplaceable.Tom Lanoye
Paul Goossens mercilessly tears to shreds the history of inequality, after which as a reader you will look a good deal more critically at the environment in which you live.Humo
Extreme inequality, after all, is about more than insanely stuffed bank accounts. It’s a machine that is continually expanding its territory, disrupting societies, unravelling welfare states and ultimately hollowing out democracy. In ‘The Inequality Machine’ Paul Goossens investigates the permanent clash, and the impossibility of pacification, between advocates of a more equal society and elites that want to hold on to their privileges. Europe has invariably sided with the 1%, as have its religious leaders and many of its most prestigious thinkers. Today all this comes down to a need to crack the code of the finance industry; only then can the inequality machine be stopped.
With characteristic passion, Paul Goossens has written a fiery pamphlet for his grandchildren, for whom his generation ought to have left a better and therefore more equal world.
You read this book first with astonishment, then with indignation and finally with impotent rage. Paul Goossens has written a book of international significance.Stefan Hertmans
