 Richard Cooper, you are a professor of international economics at Harvard, welcome to WPC-TV. And you've just been talking about inequality and globalization, but you brought up the subject of inheritance tax. What role does inheritance tax play in increasing inequalities? Well, a stiff inheritance tax would reduce inequalities. Inheritance, if one generation has differential success, some people end up with a lot of wealth, some people end up with almost no wealth. If they pass it on to the next generation, that perpetuates the inequality of income that emerged in the first generation, and the second generation gets the wealth without having earned it, so to speak. And as an economist, presumably, you think this would be bad, but surely the political pressures in almost every developed country are to lower inheritance taxes. Well that may be so, but to the extent that that's so, people should stop talking about inequality. I recognize, I've been around long enough to know that people cannot always be consistent in their values. But my point here was, here's a conflict. If you want to reduce inequality, you certainly do not want to create rentier classes in society because that perpetuates and reinforces the inequality. So to the extent that you don't want inheritance taxes, stop talking about inequality. I mean, this is a point that Thomas Piketty made very forcefully in his bestseller. Well I haven't read Piketty, so I'm... I'm sure you've read the reviews, though. I read some reviews of it, yes, but they didn't emphasize this point. No, but I mean the transmission of capital from one generation to another, so to speak. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, in the end you lose... Yeah. I suppose you increase socially, because you reduce social mobility. Is that a side effect, you think? Social mobility is actually a different phenomenon, and it's a very complex phenomenon. I think it has to do less with inequality than with things like education and other factors that people were talking about. So I'm talking about perpetuating inequality from one generation to another. Which is, inheritances do directly. I mean, you know. And so to the extent that you're concerned about inequality, you should want to diminish inheritances from one generation to another. And if you don't want to diminish inheritances, lighten up on inequality. I'm just calling for a logical consistency, that's all. Risa Kuva? I'm very much an American. I believe that every generation should make it on its own. I think the American system is pretty good, which is quite stiff, not 100%, but quite stiff tax on inheritance, estates, above a certain scale. But the owner of the net worth can avoid the tax by giving it to accepted charities, the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the Salvation Army, or whatever. So that people have a choice, either give it to your children and pay a stiff tax, or give it to social charities and avoid the tax. And that seems to me actually quite a sensible system. Sounds very good to me too. Yeah. Richard Kuva, thank you very much indeed. Right. Thank you.