Author: Abhijit Banerjee

We live today at a historically unprecedented moment in the story of inequality. In many countries—China, India, the United States, Japan and Korea, among others—the gap between the rich and the poor has widened to levels unseen since systematic data collection began. If we take a simple measure, such as the ratio of incomes earned by the top 10 per cent compared with the bottom 50 per cent, we find inequality is at its highest point in more than a century. This does not mean inequality was never worse in some earlier epoch; the feudal order of medieval Europe was…