Inequality is the economic issue of the day. Everyone's talking about it, even the Pope. Earlier this week he tweeted that inequality is the root of all social evil, which led some to wonder if the Pope had been reading Thomas Piketty's new book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". It's a weighty tome, some 640 pages long and it's caused a big stir. The essence of the book's argument is that capitalism is unfair, nothing new in that, but it's the detail of his argument that matters. Piketty says inequality is caused by the fact that capital investments grow much faster than the economy as a whole. That means that those who have money to invest, in other words the rich, will get wealthy much more quickly than everyone else who doesn't have money to invest. It's just the way the capitalist system works, and it creates inequality he says. Well I caught up with Thomas Piketty and I started by asking him what he thought should be done about it.
The main idea is to have more financial and democratic transparency of all the wealth. And then, you know, we adjust the tax rate on net wealth, depending on what we see.
