 think that's probably fair to say that inequality is a higher priority than it used to be. You know, that's not to say that the fund, I mean the fund has worried about inequality for a long time. Way back, for example, in the era of Camdesu in the 1980s, there were lots of structural adjustment programs in poor countries in response to the debt crisis and things that were going on then and it quickly became clear to many outside observers, but also the IMF, that programs had to be sustainable to work and part of being sustainable was paying attention to poverty and to distribution. So, including way back then and since then there's been attention to that. Our main program with poor countries got renamed to the poverty reduction and growth facility in the 1990s in an effort to show that we were paying more attention. But I think it's fair to say that that we've become more sort of forward or proactive in thinking about inequality in recent years as an institution. I think that partly reflects changes at the top of the institution with Astros Khan and now our managing director Lagarde having prioritized that work. It also reflects changes in the world where the salience of inequality has grown and everyone's perception thanks to things like Thomas Piketty's book, although this predates that book, but his work and other people's work showing what's been happening to inequality in some important parts of the world has raised the profile internally. We find that they are. We started that project not because we were worried about inequality particularly, but because we were trying to look at the determinants of sustained growth. There was a feeling among the profession that we had to pay attention not just to kind of the average level of growth but to phases of growth because countries would go through long periods of time sometimes with good solid growth and then it would collapse. Think of Japan in the 70s and 80s and then afterwards it sort of stopped. And then many other episodes like that. So we turned to the question of what determines the sustainability of growth. And we thought about it in a way like a medical researcher might think about life expectancy. What are the kind of things that seem to explain the chance that someone's going to die? Smoking and other characteristics of the person or habits that they have. And so we applied a similar statistical technique to growth and we actually, as I say, we didn't start with inequality as the main thing we were looking at. We looked at lots of different things. The usual suspects you might say. Trade liberalization, competitiveness of the exchange rate, quality of an economic and political institutions, inflation rates, things that the IMF we naturally turned to. And what really came out of that exercise was how strongly inequality showed up as being one of the determinants of growth spells. That's to say we found that countries that were more unequal were more likely to see their growth spells end. And so we, in the end, featured that in the results that we got. So we indeed concluded that there's been a traditional kind of separation between inequality and growth, a view that, yes, inequality may be important, poverty is certainly important, but that you should focus on growth. And then as kind of a separate step, you could think about distribution or about poverty reduction. But you should kind of mainly, the first thing to do is focus on growth. And especially if you're thinking about macro economics and big picture issues like that. And when we say two sides of the same coin, what we mean is that the relationship between growth and inequality is much more complicated than that. If inequality tends to shorten growth spells, then you want to pay attention to inequality, not just because you care about it on its own terms, which you may well, but because without paying attention to inequality, you may risk the growth in the first place. Well, to start with, we know that it must be right at some level that redistribution is harmful for growth. If you seize everyone's assets and redistribute them randomly, for example, we know from certain historical experiences and from, if you want, first principles that that's going to be very destructive. I think we know that if you tax at 100%, that's not going to help. It's going to hurt growth. What is the case, though, is that it doesn't follow that you can extend that logic to the cases we observe in the real world. That doesn't mean that spending more on health and education financed by a somewhat higher marginal tax rate is also bad for growth. So we see that kind of question as empirical. So we're not questioning this more extreme kind of trade-off, but we're sort of saying how do things work in the actual events we see in the world, where I think one can make arguments in both directions. One reason we got involved in that topic was that our first conclusion that inequality and growth are two sides of the same coin in itself led to relatively limited policy implications. We emphasized what we called win-win solutions. There are some things you can imagine would improve both, would improve equality, would reduce inequality, and at the same time be promote efficiency. So, for example, if you can say tax and externality, so you tax, for example, excessive energy consumption and use those proceeds to educate poor people, presumably that redistribution is going to promote growth in itself, aside from the effects it will have on promoting equality. So we sort of said you should do win-win things. The problem with win-win things is you should do them anyway. So while that's good to know and it's good to raise the profile of that sort of effort, it's not the hardest question on the table. So one of the challenges we faced after the first paper is that there is a school of thought that suggests that the reason inequality is bad for growth is precisely that countries try and do something about it. By that, people mean that you think about a country that's very unequal, but perhaps a democracy where political power is more evenly distributed. They may choose to redistribute to do something about that inequality. And it may be that that effort to redistribute, you raise taxes on capital, you raise taxes on the wealthy, maybe you increase transfers to the poor, all of that could be antithetical to growth, could lower growth, right? Because taxes on the rich will lower effort or cause money capital to flee or cause people to invest less. Distribution to the poor could reduce work effort by the poor. And all of that could lower growth. And so it could be that it's exactly by trying to redistribute, trying to do something about inequality that is bad for growth. So that suggests that you might, that worrying about it could cause it to be bad. And so, you know, it's hard to know what to make of all that in terms of policy conclusions. So we decided to look, to see if we could look both at redistribution and inequality together and their effects on growth together.