Inequality is a perennial subject of politics, a foundational element of economic welfare analysis, and one of the central subjects of sociology. In this episode, Dr Marco Ranaldi from University College London joins regular host Dr Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick to discuss what's new in inequality research. A central topic is Ranaldi's innovative new concept of compositional inequality, which compares the income of the top and bottom of the distribution in terms of whether that income is derived from labour or capital. The implications of compositional inequality for political economy are significant. What else is new is trends in global capitalism, especially the rise of China's middle class, the advent of artificial intelligence, superannuation funds and real estate assets making middle class boomers the new owners of the means of production, and the reluctance of states to tax inefficiently.
Marco's personal website with all his publications:
https://www.mranaldi.com/
A brief explainer of compositional inequality:
https://www.mranaldi.com/ici
Tony Atkinson's Inequality: What Can Be Done, Harvard University Press: https://www.tony-atkinson.com/new-book-inequality-what-can-be-done/
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X
Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future, W. W. Norton: https://wwnorton.com/books/the-price-of-inequality/
Heather Boushey's Unbound: How Inequality Constricts Our Economy and What We Can Do About It, Harvard University Press: https://equitablegrowth.org/unbound-how-inequality-constricts-our-economy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/
Francois Bourguignon's The Globalization of Inequality, Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691160528/the-globalization-of-inequality
A taste of the content in The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact Checking the Left's New Theory of Everything, by Christopher Snowden:
https://spiritleveldelusion.blogspot.com/
Political economists from Goldsmith's London on the domestic regime (i.e. the low interest rate coalition between home owners and hedge funds): https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/how-covid-19-revealed-the-politics-of-our-economy/