 We need really grounding in what historically important economists have done. It's not true that everything has been invented in the last 10 or 15 years. You know, these are really important people on whose foundations we're building. So if we don't know the foundations, we can be building castles in the air. My name is Branko Milanovic. I work on inequality. I'm a research professor at the Graduate Center CUNY. And the title of my new book is Visions of Inequality. The book looks how the key economists, you know, I start with Kenne and then God and Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto, Cousins, thought of inequality. And then you realize that each of them, and we too, actually focuses on some aspects of inequality. So, you know, if you will, a priority, there are some cleavages between people. So if we ignore that, we just say, okay, I'm going to calculate the genetic coefficient. That's actually I've done during lots of my life. You know, this is a pure number. But behind that number are people. And behind people are stories. And behind that is like some theory about inequality. So, you know, we need to have a view of the world. In other words, do we really care about gender inequality, class inequality, racial inequality? So it's not just a number. I mean, obviously Pareto and Cousins, I've been working with their sort of methodology and approach for many years. So I had with Marx, and interestingly with Kenne, that I had a couple of articles about his Legrand Tableau économique, and Ricardo Less, and of course, Smith was really somebody I enjoy still very much reading. So that was the selection, as it were. And then I focused on each of their work to the extent that we can interpret it now on how they saw income distribution. As you know, they didn't actually even have the terms income distribution. This was not really something that most of them, I'm not saying classics, looked at because they looked at a functional income distribution between wage earners, landlords and capitalists. So what I was trying is to, as I said in the introduction, to ask them to write an essay question. Really, they're writing an essay question. I asked them, how do you see forces that determine income distribution at this time, meaning at their time, and how do you see them evolving? And basically, I write that essay answer to that essay question for them. So that was the basic idea there. So there is lots of functional income distribution all the way until Pareto. Even if you look 1789, 1989, and the French Revolution was obviously a turning point. And to some extent, well, largely, the end of communism was another turning point. Now, your question is actually very good. Like, how do we end, basically? I think Kene is a reasonable beginning. Before that, you would have to deal with mercantilists, but it's very hard actually to argue that they had much interest in income distribution within countries. They had interest in the power of the state, accumulation of gold, but not really, or, you know, having a positive balance of trade, but not really in income distribution. Kene does actually have it. So that's a natural starting point. The end point, of course, for me was Kuznets, whom I knew quite well. But the question can be asked, why not Keynes? And I do have several mentions of Keynes, but I think Keynes essentially missed the opportunity or didn't want to engage. He could have done that easily through marginal propensity to consume, which varies with the income level. And then, of course, could lead to, you know, as people have done to underconsumption or the need to redistribute in order to increase aggregate demand. But I don't think that Keynes, in my opinion, had actually significant interest to study income distribution. So it's possible to do that. And then afterwards, in the last chapter, I do, of course, deal with people like, obviously, like Samuelson, like Friedman, imparanthetically, Allen Blind, their brolf and Brenner. So they're, I mean, obviously, big empirical economists like Tony Atkinson, François Bourguignon, they are all there, but not as individual chapters. The beginning, the motto of the epigraph of the principles is the principle problem, political economy is the distribution of income between classes. Then, of course, it is a kind of, it doesn't, doesn't disappear totally, but it was like old, how do you call this subterranean rivers? It's somewhere there, but really, it's not really noticeable very much. And now it is back. Now, I think the reason for that second period of what I called in the last chapter, the eclipse, I think there are three reasons. First, the gravity of work on economics moved to the U.S., where class was always much less important ideologically, although I'm not quite sure empirically always, than in Europe. So there was a certain perception in the U.S. that, of course, you have much greater mobility, you know, American dream and so on. Secondly, there was a movement, obviously, which started with Valras and continued afterwards, towards treatment of individuals, the famous definition by Lionel Robbins, is really every individual is the same. We are optimizing with whatever assets we have under the limited constraints and scarcity. So basically, you know, class structure is irrelevant. I think also there is a political element, because when the Soviet Union claimed, okay, we don't have classes, because we don't have capitalists anymore. The U.S. had also to claim, we don't have classes either. We are actually an open society where really asset ownership or what was, you know, called, you know, the wage system is really the system between two equivalent individuals. Power relations don't matter. So I think there was a political element for that. So as I said before, there was an endogenous turn in economics. There was a political element. And there was the fact that actually class, as such, was of less perceived importance in the U.S. than in Europe. So let's look at all the three elements. Political, I think political is no longer relevant. Communism is over. The class, everybody's capital is now, as my book, Capitalism alone says. So it's really lost its relevance. And the element of a sort of a perception of classless society in the U.S. I think has also lost some of its shine with the global financial crisis. And with the reemergence of politicization of inequality, with reappearance of the top 1% as an elite, with the fact that actually we have a system where its meritocracy is used as a way to sort of transmit the advantage across generations. So I think these are the elements that have sort of been actually the opposite of what happened during that long period between 1960 and 1990. So that's why I see the renaissance of the studies now. You know, this is kind of a new vision. I deal that in the epilogue, which is very optimistic, because I'm really quite optimistic about the future of inequality studies. Partly, we have much more data now. We have enormous amount of data, which of course we didn't have even 10 or 15 years ago. Now, when you take global inequality, which is also a new topic, the first empirical works on global inequality were done. There were some works in 1960s, but really by only a fraction of the global population. But essentially, you have to wait for China to release service for the Soviet Union to collapse and actually start releasing the service to European countries and Africa. So only then, which is late 1980s, that you have global income inequality. Now, what you concretely asked me, what is important there is that you decompose it into inequality, which are due to simply inequality in developing between the countries, plus then inequality of income between individuals within countries. And I think it's a very important political decomposition, because the first part is really telling you, is the world converging in terms, are countries becoming more similar with the income or not? And the second is telling you, are we really becoming more unequal within each individual country? These are really two different, very different political problems, as you know. To be quite honest, I think the last three years have been really a worldwide disaster. They started with COVID. I was talking before about longer term trends, but if you look last three years, and maybe unfortunately, it could be a beginning of a longer term trend in the wrong direction, but we had COVID, then we had the US, China, trade tensions, which are serious, because they have an impact on China's growth rate, on the US growth rate, on inequality within the US, inequality within China. So this is not a small thing. And then we had the Russian invasion and the war which destroyed like now maybe one-third of Ukrainian economy and increased prices of energy and food and transport. And these are the key ingredients in every middle or poor person's income, rich people as well, but they don't spend 80% of their income on food and energy, but poor people do. And now we have this conflict in the Middle East, which has been sort of obviously not a new conflict, but it has really become now even more serious because of possible involvement of others. So you know, yeah, I'm very, I mean, these are really trends which are bad. They might lead to an increase, most likely, to an increase in between national inequalities and to increase in global poverty and probably within, it's actually within national inequalities. So it is bad on all accounts. We need really grounding in what historically important economists have done. It's not true that everything has been invented in the last 10 or 15 years. You know, these are really important people on whose foundations we're building. So if we don't know the foundations, we can be building castles in the air.