I don't care if you make more money than I do, but the coexistence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty strikes me as immoral to use an old fashioned word. It's immoral because it's unnecessary, and it has bad consequences beyond itself. The great wealth attracts great political power and a society which tolerates extremes inequality of wealth also tolerates extreme differences in political activity. So why does it happen? Almost certainly true that some of the worsening inequality in the past 40 years or so comes from deregulation. We know where the juice behind the movement for deregulation came from.
Robert Solow is 98 years old and a giant among economists. He tells Steve about cracking German codes in World War II, why it’s so hard to reduce inequality, and how his field lost its way.