The essay opens with a tale about a prosperous monarch named Croesus, the final king of Lydia, who believed himself to be the happiest person on Earth. He always wanted his people to be happy and free from all their pain, but he didn't want to use any of his money to make it happen. He lost all of his wealth after falling to Cyrus the Great of Persia. The author made a comparison between Croesus's predicament and the unequal and unfairly distributed society of today.

'According to the author, Human Rights Day is observed on December 10th in the presence of inequality. The only solution to these problems is distributive equality, which the author believes is impossible to achieve in reality or in everyday life.

According to the author, writing the history of human rights alongside the history of political economy involved two stages:

• The heroic age of the national welfare states after World war II.
• The political economy ascended beyond the nation during the 1940s.

Franklin Roosevelt issued his famous call for a “ Second Bill of Rights” for socioeconomic protections in his State of the Union address the year before his death. But it missed three crucial points:

• This marked the late and ginger entry of a particular provincial US into an already predetermined North Atlantic consensus.
• His supreme promise was "special privileges for the few" instead of protection of masses which creates a ceiling of inequality.
• He hoped that it would span the globe but it was organized nationally instead of organizing internationally.

After the 1940s, human rights suffered greatly as a result of favoritism, which divided the world into two groups: US-led democratic nations and USSR-led communist nations, resulting in the cold war. Similarly, post-war decolonization could not bring about the desired development and human rights among nations because those states favored 'National Welfarism' over egalitarian human rights.

The author also considers whether another human rights movement is necessary or not in this essay. He then uses Herodotus' history, which dealt with socioeconomic fairness under pressure from the rich to the poor, to demonstrate truth and reality.

Human rights advocates contend that the human rights document guarantees and claims that all people have equal freedom and rights. However, this isn't applicable in the real world right now, especially while the existing sociopolitical system and economy are in place.

Thus, for an egalitarian society, fair distribution of wealth and property among rich and poor, redistribution of means and resources, formulation and implementation of laws for fair distribution of wealth by government, and massive and radical movements are required, though all of these are impractical, inapplicable, and difficult to achieve in practice. Our common destiny is similar to that of Croesus' world, where the rich enjoy happiness and freedom while the poor live in the world of illusion with their floating freedom and equality.

Moyn concludes by arguing that we must strive to reduce inequality in order to create a world where human rights are used to promote social change and economic equality. He also contends that we must reject the notion that human rights are only for those who have power and privilege. In summary, “ Human Rights and the Age of Inequality ” provides a detailed examination of the history of human rights and how economic inequality has hampered and limited their scope.