Title: Review of Venkat Venkatasubramanian, How Much Inequality is Fair? Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society, New York, Columbia University Press, 2017, xxi+279 pp., hb, ISBN 978-0-231-18072-6
Abstract: Reading a scholar's writing is at any rate a treat; the benefit of studying it always seems to exceed the cost of possibly confronting doubtful premises or linear thinking.Venkatasubramanian's quest for fair inequality fits that scenario.A professor of chemical engineering with Columbia University, he confidently threads interdisciplinary domains in the attempt to prove (formally) that capitalism may accommodate fairness and prosperity in the long term.The book content fulfils the promise of erudition of this ambitious project.The reader enjoys clear, at times witty, cogent prose within a wide range of scholarship, including moral philosophy, statistical mechanics, information theory, thermodynamics, game theory, systems engineering, and free-market economics.These incursions are meant to feed on each other to substantiate the book's 'mathematical theory' of 'the fairest inequality of income' in a capitalist society.The organizing themes evolve around four 'foundational questions' (17-20; see Table 1 below), which in fact divide the book in three parts: before and after chapter 5, and chapter 5 itself.