When the rich get richer, do the rest of us get poorer?

The Greatest Thing That Ever Happened to Us

For three hundred thousand years, wealth was a hoard, and the only way to get more was to take it from someone weaker. Kings grew rich by beggaring their neighbors. Ordinary people lived and died at the raw edge of hunger. The fixed pie was not a theory. It was a fact.

Then, around 1800, that world was overturned. Within two centuries the share of humanity living in crushing poverty fell from three in four to one in ten. From Plunder to Plenty tells that story and answers the question at its center: from where does wealth come? Not from better tools or harder work—humanity had both for ten thousand years and stayed poor. Two ideas did it. Both are humble, both are easy to lose, and both are under attack again, dressed as fairness.

The ancient certainty that a fortune must be a theft never died. This is the question of our time.

Inside the Book

• Why a better plow made another peasant instead of a richer one, and what finally broke the trap
• Adam Smith's discovery, the hockey stick that followed it, and why trade is not war
• The case against wealth—Marx, Piketty, Rawls—quoted in its own words, at full strength, and answered
• Where the inequality numbers come from, and what the famous charts leave out
• Inflation, price controls, tariffs, and the wealth taxes a whole continent tried and gave up
• The twentieth century's ledger: what happened everywhere the pie was seized instead of grown
• What a positive-sum society must protect, and what it owes the people change leaves behind

Not a Cheerleader's Book

The opponents get their strongest arguments. Marx, Piketty, and Rawls are quoted at length and answered on the evidence, not dismissed. Where the evidence narrows the thesis, the book says so: on China, on the minimum wage, on the one price control serious economists still argue about. It does not look away from the people the machine leaves behind, and asks whether they have been wronged, or only harmed.

Every figure carries its source—236 notes, eleven figures, a chronology, and a bibliography. Then it hands you one question to carry onto the street. It is five words long, and it works on any fortune, tariff, or protest sign.

Who It Is For

Readers of Thomas Sowell, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, and Deirdre McCloskey. Anyone who has ever argued about billionaires across a dinner table. Anyone who has stood in front of a protest sign and known there was an answer, but not found the words.

Read the prologue free