 If you look at that period from 1990s till today, till early 2020, what we see is that the biggest spike in inequality, this I'm talking about like in the personal inequality, so inequality in the personal distribution of income, took place primarily during the 1990s. That is still about like 2000. Since then, inequality has remained, using a broad measure, has remained fairly stagnant. My name is Ajit Sakhriyas and I'm affiliated with the Levy Economics Institute of Bart College. We started this research project in 2001 because of a growing concern among many scholars as well as like the general public, the educated public, the people who are activists concerned about living standards and others, you know, who thought that the official measures of economic well-being were grossly inedicated to describe what was going on in real life. So there has been effort on part of scholars to develop alternative measures and in fact the US Census Bureau was at the forefront of developing some such measures. But they always remained so to speak in the shadows and our effort was to partly bring it very much back into the limelight to focus on the broader aspects that impinge on the standard of living and also to bring forward certain aspects of which we thought were neglected. The Lemieux is an abbreviation for the Levy Institute measure of economic well-being and this is a novel measure that we developed at the Levy Institute and have used for the analysis of inequality and evolution of living standards in the US. So yes, going back to what differentiates Lemieux from many other measures, at one level you can think of it as like a broad measure of disposable household income, right? It's constructed at the level of the household from micro data, from observations on individuals and households. But it also captures things which are not captured in the conventional measures. So there are two or three areas which makes it really different. One has to do with wealth and the treatment of wealth. Normally the advantage, the economic advantage from having wealth is captured in the conventional measures in the income, the flow from wealth, right? So dividends, interest income, rental income, things like that. But what we thought was that actually is a gross, you know, there's not really reflecting the advantage from economic wealth. First of all, there's unrealized capital gains. The accumulation of wealth is happening like in financial assets and so on, which is so important for understanding the class structure of today's capitalism and especially in the United States. So we thought that this had to be brought into the picture. So we have a separate kind of accounting for advantage from wealth, which has been done in the empirical economic literature before, but we kind of resurrected it and of course refined it using modern techniques, etc. Then the other part, which is often neglected, is government expenditures for public services like education is the most important thing in the United States, but also infrastructure, physical infrastructure and social infrastructure. So we thought that these things also had to be brought into the measure of economic well-being. And finally, it was what has always remained invisible in economics. And this is the feminist described this as the male bias in economics. That is, the processes associated with providing unpaid services, domestic services and care to members of one's household production as it's generally known in economics. So we integrated that also into the measure. So it's really a complex of labor income, a broad definition of income or advantage from wealth, a broad definition of government expenditures because we include public public services, education, etc. and also household production, what remains outside the household. So if you really go back, it's like when Smith is talking about, what Adam Smith is talking about, a man being rich or poor, according to the necessary needs and conveniences of life that he can afford. So this is a modern version of the command of individuals or households have over the products that are produced in an economic system over a year, which include commodities, the products include commodities, as well as things that are not commodities like household production services from that. So that's the general idea behind Lemieux. Stagnant pays the key behind stagnant incomes in the United States. But one thing that's not been studied well, I feel, and this is something partly what we try to address in our own research, is that since 2000, living standards in the United States has been sustained to a large degree by a burjoining, a real booming of the government sector. So if you look at the 2020 estimates of the net social expenditure, which the OECD produces, the United States ranks second among all OECD countries in terms of net social expenditures. So this broader definition of social expenditures, which takes into account the benefits to the tax system, for example, mortgage interest deduction from taxable income. Employer provided health benefits. So when you include a comprehensive measure like that of net social expenditure, the United States ranks second among all OECD countries. In our own research, we have found that net government expenditures, which we define as the difference between what the government spends for the household sector and what the households pay in the form of taxes. So it's the difference between what the government spends for you versus how much do you pay in, right? So that element of the Lemieux has been crucial in sustaining middle quintiles, you know, the middle income standard of living, basically maintaining the Lemieux, at least preventing it from falling. It would have fallen if we had just let the market, so to speak, do its magic, which when stagnant workers pay, falling labor incomes, it would have led to that, right? So, but the net government expenditures and the reasons that they expand are complex, but they have actually helped sustain the living standards of average middle class Americans in the US. Well, I think that the idea of the capitalist class, right, had, in Marx's own time, it had changed a lot and Marx, let's talk about it actually in the third volume, in the unpublished volume of Capital, about the emergence of the joint stock company and how that changes, you know, that meant a transition from the older form of capitalist enterprise, which is a family enterprise, right? So that itself, he saw that as a socialization in the sense that the ownership function has become not, with no focus, embodied in the single-engine visual, but is now diffused among the shareholders of the company. And so this is something that undergoes transformation with the evolution of capitalism. And today what we have is a finance capitalist class, which is the dominant segment of the dominant faction of the capitalist class, who exerts control over, the ultimate criteria is the same. It's the control over the means of production and its disposal and its use and the benefits from using that, how that is appropriated. And I think today we can definitely talk about the finance capitalist class and that they cannot be identified, and this is where I'm linking to your question about how does this link to households and, you know, cross-sectional data, right? So the function of that aspect of it. Well, you can identify people who own large amounts of financial assets. Now, official surveys have limitations in enabling us to do that, but with some imagination and with some use of the imaginative use of the data, you can capture not all, but some aspect of it, and we have tried in our work to do that. And that's partly what I was alluding to when I talked about capturing the wealth as, you know, capturing wealth as a separate dimension of economic inequality and economic well-being. So, yes, so that has to be reckoned that the changing form of control over, like to use Marx's term, the distribution of the surplus value, right? How that is exerted, and that's through financialization, through increasing financial means that this is carried out. So, but the personal income inequality, I mean, the older way of characterizing it is functional distribution of income versus personal distribution of income, right? And these are both closely tied. So, in so far as you can make class categories, and again, it's not just a homogeneous working class anymore, right? I mean, within the working class are the people who are employed, who depend on wages and salaries for living, and so it's a very differentiated group, right? So, we can distinguish professionals, the skilled white collar workers, the skilled blue collar workers, if you like, unskilled workers, you know? So, there's a whole spectrum. There are supervisors, there are managers, so it's complex structure, the class structure of the modern capitalist society. So, we can, with relying on occupational coding which is provided in the household surveys, again, by making imaginative use of it, we can attempt to capture and describe the class structure of the societies that we actually live in. To a large extent, the big spike in inequality that took place in the last, let's say, from the early 1990s onwards, which actually means, you know, marks a departure, although also very significantly in terms of like monetary policy and the booming stock markets, you know, from early 90s, mid-90s, that you begin to see this spectacular rise in the stock market and really what that's done to the overall economy and financialization. So, within, if you look at that period from 1990s till today, till early 2020, what we see is that the biggest spike in inequality, this I'm talking about like, you know, in the personal inequality, right? So, inequality in the personal distribution of income took place primarily during the 1990s. That is still about like 2000. Since then, inequality has remained, using a broad measure, has remained fairly stagnant. But this big jump, what we find in our research, has been driven to a large extent by the growing concentration of wealth. In the conventional story, if you ignore wealth and if you just look at like labor income, then you see like, you know, the foreign trade, you know, competition from abroad, migration or immigration, all this begins to be the bigger driver of the economic inequality. So, this is where measurements matter, whether you bring into picture, your picture of the living standards and distribution of income should bring that class dimension into the picture. And this is important in terms of understanding what drives inequality. So, it's not, otherwise it's like, you know, the Mexican who crosses the border, the immigration or the foreign competition from China, not that they are unimportant. But you also have to look at what's happening within the dynamic of class relations between the capitalist class and the rest of the people, you know. So, often in the US, popular political populist language is the one person versus the 99 person, right? What's happening with them? So, yeah. So, yeah, the big driver of inequality during that period, we find the big driver of that was growing inequality in the distribution of wealth.