Branko Milanovic

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). 103 . Branko Milanovic Capitalism, Alone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019); Yonatan Berman and Branko Milanovic, “Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950–2020,” Working Paper No. 28, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, Graduate Center, City University of New York, December 2020, https:// stonecenter .gc .cuny .edu /research /homoploutia -top -labor -and -capital -incomes -in -the -united -states -1950 -2020 / . Marco Ranaldi and Branko Milanovic, “Capitalist Systems and Income Inequality,” Journal of Comparative Economics 50, no. 1 (2022): 20–32. 104 .

…

Atkinson, and Salvatore Morelli, “Top Wealth Shares in the UK over More Than a Century, INET Oxford Working Paper , No. 2017–01 (2016); Peter Lindert, “Unequal British Wealth since 1867,” Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 6 (1986): 1127–1162. 8 . Branko Milanovic, Peter Lindert, and Jeffrey Williamson, “Pre-industrial Inequality,” Economic Journal 121, no. 1 (2011): 255–272. 9 . Milanovic, “Level and Distribution of Income,” table 4. 10 . Branko Milanovic “Towards an Explanation of Inequality in Pre-modern Societies: The Role of Colonies, Urbanization, and High Population Density,” Economic History Review 71, no. 4 (2018): 1029–1047, figure 3. 11 .

…

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1936). 5 . Thomas Piketty, Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901–1998 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 6 . Branko Milanovic, “The Return of ‘Patrimonial Capitalism’: Review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, ” Journal of Economic Literature, 52, no. 2 (2014): 519–534. 7 . Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 8 . Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020). 9 .

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

Vignette 3.9 - Geopolitics in Light of (or Enlightened by) Economics Notes Further Readings Index Copyright Page Praise for The Haves and the Have-Nots “Where do you rank in the all-time world distribution of income? How about Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy? Or Anna Karenina? Was Octavian Augustus richer than Bill Gates? Why might China fall apart, like the USSR and Yugoslavia? Why should we care about differences in income and wealth? In this book of many delights, Branko Milanovic, who has spent twenty-five years studying global inequality, provides us with a veritable Arabian Nights of stories about inequality, drawing from history, literature, and everywhere in the world. A pleasure to read, and an eye-opener for haves and for have-nots alike.” —ANGUS DEATON, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Princeton University, 2009 President of the American Economic Association, author of The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy “Learn about the serious subject of economic inequality while you have plenty of fun traveling around the globe and far back in time!

…

—ANGUS DEATON, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Princeton University, 2009 President of the American Economic Association, author of The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy “Learn about the serious subject of economic inequality while you have plenty of fun traveling around the globe and far back in time! Through fascinating stories and wonderful illustrations, Branko Milanovic explains income and wealth inequality—their concepts, measurement, evolution, and role in human life—without compromising precision or balance. This is a delightful book, as commendable for vacations as for the classroom.” —THOMAS POGGE, Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University, author of World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms For N. and G.

…

The ideas of both the universal proletarian brotherhood and the “permanent revolution” were given up.7 FIGURE 2 The level and composition of global inequality in 1870 and 2000 (Gini decomposition) Sources: François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, “The Size Distribution of Income Among World Citizens, 1820-1990,” American Economic Review (September 2002): 727-744; Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), fig. 11.3. Marx’s world had thus gone topsy-turvy in some 150 years. Why? Because the underlying global income distribution had changed. Around 1870 global inequality between world citizens was less than it is today (see Figure 2).

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic
Published 10 Apr 2016

GLOBAL INEQUALITY A New Approach for the Age of Globalization BRANKO MILANOVIC THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016 Copyright © 2016 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Author photo: R. Krstinic Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth 978-0-674-73713-6 (alk. paper) 978-0-674-96976-6 (EPUB) 978-0-674-96978-0 (MOBI) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Milanović, Branko, author. Title: Global inequality : a new approach for the age of globalization / Branko Milanovic. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

…

“Wages, Capital and Top Incomes: The Factor Income Composition of Top Incomes in the USA, 1960–2005.” Unpublished ms., November version. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2013. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper, no. 6719, December. Available at http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-6719. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2015. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” World Bank Economic Review, Advance Access published August 12, 2015, doi: 10.1093/wber/lhv039.

…

The data used in this chapter come from more than 600 household surveys covering about 120 countries and more than 90 percent of the world’s population over the period 1988–2011. (Most of the data are available on my website: https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Page-Elements /Academics-Research-Centers-Initiatives/Centers-and-Institutes/Luxembourg-Income-Study-Center/Branko-Milanovic,-Senior-Scholar/Datasets.) In the more recent period, after the year 2000, all household survey data are available at the micro level (the level of individual household) with the big exception of China, which does not yet release microdata. All incomes are expressed in 2005 PPP (or international) dollars obtained from the 2005 ICP except where otherwise indicated.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

Johnson, Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, White House Historical Association, 2006, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/lyndon-b-johnson/ 42 Term coined in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, Joseph Schumpeter, Harper Brothers, 1950 (first published 1942) 43 “A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Milton Friedman, The New York Times, September 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html. 44 Global Income Distribution From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession, Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, World Bank, December 2013, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/914431468162277879/pdf/WPS6719.pdf 45 “Deconstructing Branko Milanovic's ‘Elephant Chart’: Does It Show What Everyone Thinks?” Caroline Freund, PIIE, November 2016, https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/deconstructing-branko-milanovics-elephant-chart-does-it-show. 46 US District Court for the District of Columbia - 97 F. Supp. 2d 59 (D.D.C. 2000), June 7, 2000, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/97/59/2339529/. 47 Commission Decision of May 24, 2004 relating to a proceeding pursuant to Article 82 of the EC Treaty and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement against Microsoft Corporation, Eur-Lex, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?

…

Growth, equality, and history. Explorations in Economic History, 22(4), 341–377.. There was just one problem: over time, the theory no longer held true. Some of the facts we face today reveal this. Inequality in fact began rising again in highly developed countries. In a 2016 note, economist Branko Milanovic suggested that the current upswing in inequality could be viewed "as a second Kuznets curve", or indeed, as a "Kuznets wave" (Figure 2.2). Income Inequality There is a festering wound in our global economic system, and that wound is rising income inequality. The story starts with an unexpected twist.

…

According to his colleague at the National Bureau of Economic Research Robert Fogel, Kuznets repeatedly warned that his “allusions to fragmentary data were not evidence but ‘pure guesswork.’”60 Kuznets, in other words, was all too well aware that his findings in the 1950s may have been only valid in very specific circumstances, which indeed this golden era of capitalism turned out to be. Fogel also noted that even at the time, Kuznets found “factors that arose during the course of growth, and that created pressures both to increase and to reduce inequality.” Branko Milanovic, a former lead economist at the World Bank, recently tried to build a new Kuznets curve in light of these insights. Kuznets notably pointed to technology as a factor that could have a positive or a negative effect on inequality. Milanovic derived from it an inequality curve that seems much more complete, given the evolution we've seen in recent decades.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

Johnson, Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey, White House Historical Association, 2006, https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/lyndon-b-johnson/ 42 Term coined in “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, Joseph Schumpeter, Harper Brothers, 1950 (first published 1942) 43 “A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” Milton Friedman, The New York Times, September 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html. 44 Global Income Distribution From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession, Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, World Bank, December 2013, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/914431468162277879/pdf/WPS6719.pdf 45 “Deconstructing Branko Milanovic's ‘Elephant Chart’: Does It Show What Everyone Thinks?” Caroline Freund, PIIE, November 2016, https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/deconstructing-branko-milanovics-elephant-chart-does-it-show. 46 US District Court for the District of Columbia - 97 F. Supp. 2d 59 (D.D.C. 2000), June 7, 2000, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/97/59/2339529/. 47 Commission Decision of May 24, 2004 relating to a proceeding pursuant to Article 82 of the EC Treaty and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement against Microsoft Corporation, Eur-Lex, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?

…

Growth, equality, and history. Explorations in Economic History, 22(4), 341–377.. There was just one problem: over time, the theory no longer held true. Some of the facts we face today reveal this. Inequality in fact began rising again in highly developed countries. In a 2016 note, economist Branko Milanovic suggested that the current upswing in inequality could be viewed "as a second Kuznets curve", or indeed, as a "Kuznets wave" (Figure 2.2). Income Inequality There is a festering wound in our global economic system, and that wound is rising income inequality. The story starts with an unexpected twist.

…

According to his colleague at the National Bureau of Economic Research Robert Fogel, Kuznets repeatedly warned that his “allusions to fragmentary data were not evidence but ‘pure guesswork.’”60 Kuznets, in other words, was all too well aware that his findings in the 1950s may have been only valid in very specific circumstances, which indeed this golden era of capitalism turned out to be. Fogel also noted that even at the time, Kuznets found “factors that arose during the course of growth, and that created pressures both to increase and to reduce inequality.” Branko Milanovic, a former lead economist at the World Bank, recently tried to build a new Kuznets curve in light of these insights. Kuznets notably pointed to technology as a factor that could have a positive or a negative effect on inequality. Milanovic derived from it an inequality curve that seems much more complete, given the evolution we've seen in recent decades.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

I'd Hke to thank, among many, Laura Stare-cheski for her excellent research w^ork; my good friend Philippa Dunne for her many forms of collaboration; CoHn Robinson for being the best publisher one could ask for; and Andre Schiffrin and the staff of The New Press for both their professional skills and their role as splendid office-mates. Thanks also to Jared Bernstein, Patrick Bond, Heather Boushey, Tom Frank, Branko Milanovic, Christian Parenti, Michael Perehnan, Kim PhiUips-Fein, Nomi Prins, Max Sawicky, Michal SeHgman, Gregg Wirth, the members of the Ibo-talk Hstserv. And, most of all, thanks to my wife, Liza Featherstone, who not only made this a better book with her comments on the manuscript, but who makes Hfe worth Hving as well.

…

Average incomes—which usually mean GNP or GDP divided by population—tell you nothing about distribution; Brazil and Poland are at roughly equal per capita income levels, but Poland's poor get three times the share of national income that Brazil's claim, and its rich a lot less.^^ Estimates of global income distribution that uses people, rather than nations, as the unit of analysis, are preferable, but are extremely difficult to produce. Thankfully, World Bank economist Branko Milanovic has made a first attempt, about which more in a bit. Big picture According to economic theory, the income gaps between rich and poor countries should narrow over time, as laggards "catch up" with leaders. Proponents of such theories assume that technology is the driving force behind economic development; as technology diffuses throughout the world, the advantage enjoyed by the pioneers should fade.

…

Many of the surveys they rely on are far from exhaustive, and they rely on currency conversions that may understate the real cost of Hving. These points are weU taken, and the World Bank estimates no doubt understate the case, but even their numbers are huge. It's easy for those of us who live in rich countries to forget that most people don't Hve like we do. Thanks to Branko Milanovic, we can put some firm numbers on the observation. Milanovic has made a pioneering effort to combine scores of national household surveys to come up with the first estimate of income distribution from the point of view of individual residents of the earth. His numbers are stunning. Of course, Milanovic couldn't get household survey data—that is, income estimates based on asking people questions about their incomes, as opposed to aggregates Hke national GDP accounts—^for every country.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM Also by Edward Luce In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM EDWARD LUCE Atlantic Monthly Press New York Copyright © 2017 by Edward Luce Jacket design by Duncan Spilling - L,BBG Fig. 1, “The Elephant Chart”, printed with the permission of Branko Milanovic. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

…

Today, the US median income is still below where it was at the beginning of this century. Clearly what the typical American understands by growth differs greatly from that of macroeconomists. GDP numbers insist we are doing well, at a time when half the country is suffering from personal recessions. The world’s most informative graph is the Elephant Chart.* Devised by Branko Milanovic, a former World Bank staffer, this statistical pachyderm has many virtues. It is intuitively simple and tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the era of high globalisation since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It shows the distribution of more than two decades of growth between different percentiles of the global economy.

…

Part One: Fusion 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part II (1840). 2 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (James Pott & Company, New York, 1902), p. 333. 3 Jamil Anderlini and Lucy Hornby, ‘China overtakes US as world’s largest goods trader’, Financial Times, 10 January 2014, <https://www.ft.com/content/7c2dbd70-79a6-11e3-b381-00144feabdc0>. 4 Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Belknap Press, Cambridge MA, 2016 (ebook)). 5 Danny Quah, ‘The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity’, Global Policy, 2:1 (January 2011), <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1758-5899.2010.00066.x/pdf>. 6 Milanovic, Global Inequality. 7 Hobson, Imperialism, p. 339. 8 Milanovic, Global Inequality. 9 Richard Baldwin: The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization (Belknap Press, Cambridge MA, 2016 (ebook)). 10 Hugh White, The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012 (ebook)). 11 The World Economic Forum’s website has a comprehensive database of each forum’s reports and sessions stretching back many years.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

Colombia is not an especially poor country; its aid is associated with the attempt to suppress the cocaine cartels. Only about one fifth of U.S. aid goes to countries classified by the OECD as “least developed,” while about half of all U.S. aid goes to “lower-middle-income” nations. Nor is it only the United States that gives aid to serve political aims rather than to help the extremely poor. Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank, has examined the 2001 country-to-country aid disbursed by most OECD countries, and found that bilateral aid from the European Union— that is, the program run by the EU itself, which is separate from the individual aid programs of its member nations—is even more skewed than U.S. aid toward nations with a per capita income above the world average.

…

On that basis, the task force reached a global estimate—which the task force warns is provisional, but believes is of “the right order of magnitude”— of $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015.5 When we take account of existing official development aid promises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74 billion for 2015. Now we can calculate how much each affluent person would have to contribute for the combined sum to meet these totals and achieve these results. According to Branko Milanovic of the World Bank, if we define the “rich” as those who have an income above the average income of Portugal (the lowest-income nation in the “rich club” of western Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) then there are 855 million rich people in the world.6 If each of us gave $200 per year, that would total $171 billion, or roughly the amount Sachs’s United Nations task force believes is needed each year to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

…

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Donor Aid Charts, www.oecd.org/countrylist/0,2578,en_2649_374l3_1783495_l_l_l_374l3,00.html;see also Oxfam America, “Smart Development: Why U.S. Foreign Aid Demands Major Reform,” February 2008, www.oxfamamerica.org/newsandpublications/publications/briefing_papers/smart-development/smart-development-feb2008.pdf 4. Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 152-53, table 12.1; United Nations Human Development Report, 2007-2008, p. 289, Table 17, available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_20072008_en _indicator_tables. p df. 5.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

I made these calculations using the tool on the website www.givingwhatwecan.org, where you see how your wealth compares to the world population. 29. Branko Milanovic, “Global income inequality: the past two centuries and implications for 21st century” (Fall 2011) http://www.cnpds.it/documenti/milanovic.pdf 30. “62 people own same as half world,” Oxfam (January 20, 2014). http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/62-people-own-same-as-half-world-says-oxfam-inequality-report-davos-world-economic-forum 31. Nicholas Hobbes, Essential Militaria: Facts, Legends, and Curiosities About Warfare Through the Ages (2004). 32. Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers.” 33.

…

Back to the Somalian child mortality front. In the 19th century, inequality was still a matter of class; nowadays, it’s a matter of location. “Workers of the world, unite!” was the rallying cry back when all the poor everywhere were more or less equally miserable. But now, as the World Bank’s lead economist Branko Milanovic notes, “Proletarian solidarity is then simply dead because there is no longer such a thing as the global proletariat.”32 In the Land of Plenty, the poverty line is 17 times higher than in the wilds beyond Cockaigne.33 Even food stamp recipients in the U.S. live like royalty compared to the poorest people in the world.

…

Slavery was positively lenient compared to the customary repertoire of hanging, quartering, and burning at the stake. But it’s also worth noting that many commentators didn’t catch on to More’s intended irony because they didn’t read his book in the original Latin. Our tour guide in More’s utopia, for example, is named Hythlodaeus, which translates as “speaker of nonsense.” 34. Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality: From Class to Location, from Proletarians to Migrants,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (September 2011). http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-5820 2 A 15-Hour Workweek 1. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), Essays in Persuasion. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf 2.

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
by Vincent Bevins
Published 18 May 2020

Some of the most equal societies on Earth, often in Northern Europe, hit lows of around 25, and South Africa, one of the world’s most unequal nations, has a GINI index of 65. Data for the graph was provided by economist Branko Milanovic. The dotted line (weighted by country population) more clearly shows the effects of Chinese growth. For more on his methods, see Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality. Appendix 4 Global Inequality, 1960–2017 This graph is reproduced with permission from Jason Hickel, The Divide (William Heinemann, 2017). Appendix 5 Anticommunist Extermination Programs, 1945–2000 The map above illustrates intentional mass murder carried out to eliminate leftists or accused leftists, and does not include deaths from regular war, collateral damage from military engagements, or unintentional deaths (starvation, disease) caused by anticommunist governments.

…

Gautam Nair, “Most Americans Vastly Underestimate How Rich They Are Compared with the Rest of the World. Does It Matter?” Washington Post, August 23, 2018. 4. Branko Milanovic, “Income, Inequality, and Poverty during the Transition from Planned to Market Economy,” World Bank Regional and Sectoral Studies, chap. 3, www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/Income_ineq_poverty_book.pdf. 5. Branko Milanovic, “For Whom the Wall Fell?” The Globalist, November 7, 2014. 6. Westad, The Global Cold War, 387. 7. On the “strong and widespread global trend toward neoliberalism since the 1980s,” see Jonathan D.

…

Certainly, the leaders of the Communist Parties who ran the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries lost, and lost big. But what about their citizens, the regular, suffering peoples of the communist world? Did the triumph of global capitalism mean victory for them too? Were they rewarded with prosperity and democracy? Economist Branko Milanovic, one of the world’s foremost experts on global inequality, born and raised in communist Yugoslavia, asked those questions on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. We can probably guess that no, they didn’t all get that. But it was certainly the idea back in 1991, and in many ways it was the promise that was made to the suffering peoples of the communist world, including to Milanovic himself.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Since 2005, productivity growth has slowed by a full percentage point, to around 1.25%.9 FIGURE I.4: Global inequality that is across as opposed to within countries from 1820 to 2011, measured by the mean logarithmic deviation (see chapter 3). This series is based on a merger of the data of François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820–1992, 92 American Economic Review 4 (2002), and Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live?, 97 Review of Econonomics & Statistics 2 (2015), performed by Branko Milanovic as a favor to us. FIGURE I.5: Average annual real productivity growth around the world for various regions or countries and time periods, 1950–2013. Source: OECD. This phenomenon has been less dramatic in the United States than in other wealthy countries.

…

FIGURE 3.1: Global inequality, both in total (black) and decomposed into between (dark gray) and within (light gray) country components from 1820 to 2011. Source: This series is based on a merger of the data of François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820–1992, 92 American Economic Review 4 (2002), and Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live?, 97 Review of Econonomics & Statistics 2 (2015), performed by Branko Milanovic as a favor to us. Together these patterns imply that inequality across countries has gone from a relatively insignificant phenomenon in the grand scheme of global inequality, accounting for only a little more than 10% of global inequality in the 1820s, to being the dominant source of global inequality, accounting for two-thirds or more in the second half of the twentieth century and still today accounting for 60–70% depending on whose measurements you rely upon.9 This puts into quantitative perspective the very different world we confront today, compared to the one nineteenth-century political economists faced.

…

Graham Haviland, Eliot Levmore, Stella Shannon, Han-ah Sumner, and Jill Rogowski provided invaluable assistance. A conference on our manuscript hosted by the Cowles Foundation at Yale University and supported enthusiastically by its director Larry Samuelson helped shape our thinking. Seven discussants (Ian Ayres, Dirk Bergemann, Jacob Hacker, Nicole Immorlica, Branko Milanovic, Tim Shenk, and Matt Weinzierl) provided us vital feedback. Tim was particularly helpful in shaping our understanding of the relevant history of ideas. We also received comments from many friends and colleagues, including Anna Blender, Charlotte Cavaille, Patrick Collison, Adam Cox, Richard Eskow, Marion Fourcade, Alex Peysakovich, Greg Shaw, Itai Sher, Steve Swig, Tommaso Valetti, and Steve Weyl.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

number of billionaires relative to the size Ruchir Sharma.,“The billionaires list,” Washington Post’s Wonkblog, June 24, 2012. economic historians have found that Russia’s oligarchs Steven Nafziger and Peter Lindert, “Russian Inequality on the Eve of the Revolution” (working paper, March 13, 2011). according to calculations by Branko Milanovic Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (Basic Books, 2011), pp. 41–45. “A person must be rich or poor” Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter V, Section 1. the only place in Mexico Luhnow, “The Secrets of the World’s Richest Man.”

…

The laborer has now more comforts than the farmer had a few generations ago. The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly clad and better housed. The landlord has books and pictures rarer and appointments more artistic than the king could then obtain. —Andrew Carnegie Branko Milanovic is an economist at the World Bank. He first became interested in income inequality studying for his PhD in the 1980s in his native Yugoslavia, where he discovered it was officially viewed as a “sensitive” subject—which meant one the ruling regime didn’t want its scholars to look at too closely.

…

But the irony of the victory of the liberal economic idea is that putting it into practice delivered the greatest rent-seeking windfall in economic history—the state, after all, was in charge of privatization. Influencing that one-off division of the spoils was one of the surest ways to join today’s global super-elite. WHO WAS THE RICHEST MAN IN HISTORY? In fact, according to calculations by Branko Milanovic, the richest man who ever lived isn’t a Russian oligarch, but he does owe much of his fortune to the great wave of liberalization that swept the world when Soviet communism collapsed. Comparing income across history is hard. The conversion tools we use to make comparisons across geographies today—currency exchange rates or the more subtle measure of purchasing power parity—are ineffective when the goods we consume—horses vs. private jets or personal scribes vs. iPads—are so different.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

“The Fundamental Institutions of China’s Reforms and Development.” Journal of Economic Literature 49(4): 1076–1151. Yang, Li, Filip Novokmet, and Branko Milanovic. 2019. “From Workers to Capitalists in Less than Two Generations: A Study of Chinese Urban Elite Transformation between 1988 and 2013.” Unpublished manuscript. Yonzan, Nishant. 2018. “Assortative Mating and Labor Income Inequality: United States 1970–2017.” Unpublished manuscript. Yonzan, Nishant, Branko Milanovic, Salvatore Morelli, and Janet Gornick. 2018. “Comparing Top Incomes between Survey and Tax Data: US Case Study.” LIS “Inequality Matters” Newsletter, Issue 6, pp. 10–11, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg, June. https://www.lisdatacenter.org/newsletter/nl-2018-6-h-4/.

…

CAPITALISM, ALONE The Future of the System That Rules the World BRANKO MILANOVIC THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2019 Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Jacket art: background: wepix/E+/Getty Images; inset: medobear/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth 978-0-674-24286-9 (EPUB) 978-0-674-24287-6 (MOBI) 978-0-674-24285-2 (PDF) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from loc.gov ISBN: 978-0-674-98759-3 (alk. paper) CONTENTS 1.

…

On monopoly power and rising capital share, see Kurz (2018). He finds that the “surplus income” (the share of monopoly profit in output value) increased in the United States from virtually 0 in 1986 to 22 percent in 2015 (table 7). On monopsony power, see Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum (2017). 15. See Branko Milanovic, “Bob Solow on Rents and Decoupling of Productivity and Wages,” Globalinequality blog, May 2, 2015, http://glineq.blogspot.com/2015/05/bob-solow-on-rents-and-decoupling-of.html. 16. The market power, or rent-seeking, explanation for the rising share of capital versus labor has been adduced by a number of economists, including by Angus Deaton in an interview with editors of the ProMarket blog on February 8, 2018: https://promarket.org/angus-deaton-discussed-driver-inequality-america-easier-rent-seekers-affect-policy-much-europe/. 17.

The Globalization of Inequality
by François Bourguignon
Published 1 Aug 2012

During the last few years, rising inequality in certain countries, notably the United States, has been the subject of or inspiration for several major books—among which it would be difficult to overstate the importance of two recent books by Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Piketty, the success of which is a clear sign of the mounting public interest in the issue of inequality.2 While few books address global income inequality directly, with the exception of Branko Milanovic’s Worlds Apart,3 many have analyzed inequalities in development between 2 Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3 Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart, Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Globalization and Inequality5 countries or regions, which are the principal determinants of inequality at the world level.

…

Atkinson and François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, volume 2 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming). For the GDP per capita approach, see Xavier Sala-­i-­Martin, “The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and . . . Convergence, Period,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2 (December 2006): 351–97; and for its critique, see Branko Milanovic, “The Ricardian Vice: Why Sala-­i-­Martin’s Calculations of World Income Inequality Are Wrong” (Washington, DC: World Bank, November 2002). 5 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-­Paul Fitoussi (with a preface by Nicolas Sarkozy), Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010). 

…

In fact, once we stop normalizing and use the original household survey data, estimates of global distribution show a slightly slower reversal in inequality trends. The acceleration then takes place in the 2000s rather than the mid-­ 1990s.16 Since this represents a more recent phenomenon, maybe it has not registered for everyone yet. See table 2 in the appendix to this chapter. Using a different database, Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (“Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6719, Washington, DC, 2013) found the same drop in inequality in the 2000s, although less pronounced than in table 2. Two recent draft papers reach the same conclusion.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Income growth, 1988–2008, for each 5 per cent global income group and top 1 per cent. Source: Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Economic Review 30, no. 2 (July 2016): 203–232, https://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1093/wber/lhv039. This elephant first appeared a few years after the global financial crisis, in a statistical graphic developed by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (Figure 2.1). Summarising hundreds of surveys of living standards around the world, the “elephant chart” depicts how each segment of the global income distribution—from the world’s very poorest to the global top 1 per cent—has fared over the last few decades.

…

Among the many people who have over the years given me ideas, information, inspiration, knowledge, feedback, or encouragement are Dimitra Alexopoulou, David Autor, Richard Baldwin, Torsten Bell, Jared Bernstein, Michael Goldfarb, Heather Grabbe, Jason Furman, Arancha Gonzalez, Sandra Kanthal, Joris Luyendijk, Philippe Martin, Branko Milanovic, Karl Ove Moene, Yascha Mounk, Christian Odendahl, Jan Piotrowski, Dani Rodrik, John Springford, Simon Tilford, Kevin O’Rourke, Betsey Stevenson, Arvind Subramanian, Adam Tooze, Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe, Anne Case, Diane Coyle, Angus Deaton, Swati Dhingra, Ben Friedman, Marcel Fratzscher, David McWilliams, Halvor Mehlum, Adrian Wood, and many, many more.

…

Better understanding how the world is connected can sometimes spur us to be motivated by something more than our own narrow self-interest, in the knowledge that in the longer term, our deepest interests are bound up with those others who live very different lives from ours. That knowledge is the foundation for a fair and liberal society, and it has rarely been more urgently needed than today. NOTES Chapter 1. The End of Belonging 1. Indeed, the economist and inequality scholar Branko Milanovic classifies China’s “political capitalism” as a subvariant of a globally dominant capitalist system in his account of a global economy where capitalism is now unchallenged. Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

It matters (or at least it used to) which you choose. Figure 3.5, constructed by economist Branko Milanovic, depicts both stories.23 The bottom line shows intercountry inequality based on unweighted averages (every country counts the same), and the top line represents the weighted average (proportional to population size). Each measures inequality using the Gini coefficient in which 0 means perfect equality and 1 means perfect inequality. The two lines show very different patterns—at least until around 2000. FIGURE 3.5: GLOBAL INEQUALITY—GETTING BETTER Source: Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now—An Overview,” policy research working paper 6259, World Bank, Development Research Group, Poverty and Inequality Team, Washington, DC, November, 2012.

…

An updated version of the latter paper (written with Tatjana Kleineberg) is “Growth Still Is Good for the Poor,” policy research working paper 6568, World Bank, Development Research Group, Macroeconomics and Growth Team, Washington, DC, August 2013, http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-6568. 20. Dollar and Kraay, “Growth Is Good for the Poor.” 21. Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 22. De Souza, “Poverty, Inequality, and Social Policies in Brazil.” 23. Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now—An Overview,” policy research working paper 6259, World Bank, Development Research Group, Poverty and Inequality Team, Washington, DC, November 2012, http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/pdf/10.1596/1813-9450-6259. 24.

…

Because of these variables, it is not unusual to hear contrasting claims about income inequality. One person claims it is getting better, while another claims it is getting worse, but the difference comes down to how he or she defines inequality. In the context of development, the two most common notions of inequality are within countries and across countries. Economist Branko Milanovic explores these and other ideas about inequality in developing countries in his terrific book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.21 Inequality Within Countries Most people have a strong presumption that inequality within countries worsens as economic growth proceeds, and—possibly—gets better at higher income levels.

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

One of the signature claims for the boosters of v.3.0, as it was for v.1.0, was that while the new system was geared towards capital rather than labour, the resulting growth would “raise all boats”, or at least “trickle down” to everyone else. However, the problem we discovered by about 1995, through the work of economists such as Tony Atkinson, Martin Wolf, Thomas Piketty and Branko Milanovic, was that it was all trickling up, not down. The numbers are well known, and we have mentioned some already, but just to recap, remember the following. While globalization certainly benefitted workers in the developing world, workers in the bottom 50 per cent of the global income distribution captured only 12 per cent of total growth.

…

In two brilliant articles – “Why rigged capitalism is damaging social democracy” (FT, 18 September 2019) and “How to reform today’s rigged capitalism” (FT, 3 December 2019) – he summarises both what is wrong and what should be done. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Random House, 2017) is a brilliant rebalancing of how economics should be done, putting true sustainability at its core. For a much less hopeful, but equally plausible account, see Branko Milanovic’s brilliant Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). A huge amount has now been written about inequality. Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) can take a lot of credit for this.

…

But despite being a bestseller, and having influenced both of us in different ways, it is really a book for specialists – and if anything has provoked as much controversy as agreement, at least among economists. For an easier take on the issues around inequality, Tony Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) is superb. For a global picture, Branko Milanovic’s Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) is unrivallled. The effects of technology on our economies – beyond the obvious effects on our lives – are very unclear. Among the most insightful work is Erik Brynjolfsson’s at MIT.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

gives voice to their perceptions: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), Kindle, location 139. The famous Elephant Graph, drawn by economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner: Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2013), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/914431468162277879/pdf/WPS6719.pdf. Increase in Real Income, 1988–2008: Ibid. “The people who gained the least were almost entirely from the ‘mature economies’ ”: Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution since 1988,” CEPR Policy Portal, accessed March 25, 2019, https://voxeu.org/article/global-income-distribution-1988.

…

It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do.”V Both of these books, and many other recent investigations, have focused on middle-class to lower-middle-class households and communities. The famous Elephant Graph, drawn by economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner, helps us understand why this segment of society might be feeling so much alienation and resentment. Milanovic and Lakner had the great idea to essentially line up all the people in the world from poorest to richest, then see how much their incomes changed between 1988 and 2008.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

I am extremely grateful to a number of colleagues who generously shared their unpublished work with me: Guido Alfani, Kyle Harper, Michael Jursa, Geoffrey Kron, Branko Milanovic, Ian Morris, Henrik Mouritsen, Josh Ober, Peter Lindert, Bernhard Palme, Şevket Pamuk, Mark Pyzyk, Ken Scheve, David Stasavage, Peter Turchin, and Jeffrey Williamson. Brandon Dupont and Joshua Rosenbloom very helpfully generated and shared statistics on wealth distribution in the United States during the Civil War period. Leonardo Gasparini, Branko Milanovic, Şevket Pamuk, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Ken Scheve, Mikael Stenkula, Rob Stephan, and Klaus Wälde kindly sent me data files.

…

424 Appendix: The Limits of Inequality 445 Bibliography 457 Index 495 FIGURES AND TABLES FIGURES I.1Top 1 percent income share in the United States (per year) and references to “income inequality” (three-year moving averages), 1970–2008 1.1General form of the social structure of agrarian societies 3.1Inequality trends in Europe in the long run 3.2Gini coefficients of wealth distribution in Italy and the Low Countries, 1500–1800 3.3Ratio of mean per capita GDP to wages and real wages in Spain, 1277–1850 3.4Inequality trends in Latin America in the long run 3.5Inequality trends in the United States in the long run 4.1Top income shares in Japan, 1910–2010 5.1Top 1 percent income shares in four countries, 1935–1975 5.2Top 0.1 percent income shares in Germany and the United Kingdom 5.3Top 1 percent wealth shares in ten countries, 1740–2011 5.4Ratios of private wealth to national income in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the world, 1870–2010 5.5Capital income share in total gross income for top 1 percent of incomes in France, Sweden, and the United States, 1920–2010 5.6The share of government spending in national income in seven countries, 1913–1918 5.7Top marginal tax rates in nine countries, 1900–2006 5.8Average top rates of income and inheritance taxation in twenty countries, 1800–2013 5.9World War I and average top rates of income taxation in seventeen countries 5.10Top 1 percent income share in Germany, 1891–1975 5.11Top 1 percent income share in Sweden, 1903–1975 5.12State marginal income tax rates in Sweden, 1862–2013 5.13Trade union density in ten OECD countries, 1880–2008 6.1Military size and mobilization rates in years of war in great power states, 1650–2000 6.2Gini coefficients of income and top 0.01 percent income share in Spain, 1929–2014 9.1Median house sizes in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages 9.2House size quartiles in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages 9.3Gini coefficients of house sizes in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages 10.1Real wages of urban unskilled workers in Europe and the Levant, 1300–1800 10.2Real wages of urban skilled workers in Europe and the Levant, 1300–1800 10.3Rural real wages measured in terms of grain in England, 1200–1869 10.4Top 5 percent wealth shares and Gini coefficients of wealth distribution in the cities of Piedmont, 1300–1800 10.5Gini coefficients of wealth in Poggibonsi, 1338–1779 10.6Top 5 percent wealth shares in Tuscany, 1283–1792 10.7Top 5 percent wealth shares and Gini coefficients of wealth distribution in Lucca, 1331–1561 11.1Real wages expressed in multiples of bare-bones consumption baskets in central Mexico, 1520–1820 11.2Daily wheat wages of unskilled rural and urban workers in Egypt, third century BCE to fifteenth century CE 11.3Changes in real prices and rents between 100–160s and 190s–260s CE in Roman Egypt 11.4Wealth inequality in Augsburg: number of taxpayers, average tax payments, and Gini coefficients of tax payments, 1498–1702 13.1Gross National Income and Gini coefficients in different countries, 2010 13.2Estimated and conjectured income Gini coefficients for Latin America, 1870–1990 (population-weighted averages for four, six, and sixteen countries) 14.1Counterfactual inequality trends in the twentieth century 15.1Top 1 percent income shares in twenty OECD countries, 1980–2013 A.1Inequality possibility frontier A.2Estimated income Gini coefficients and the inequality possibility frontier in preindustrial societies A.3Extraction rates for preindustrial societies and their counterpart modern societies A.4Inequality possibility frontier for different values of the social minimum A.5Different types of inequality possibility frontiers TABLES 2.1The development of the largest reported fortunes in Roman society and the population under Roman control, second century BCE to fifth century CE 5.1The development of top income shares during the world wars 5.2Variation in the rate of reduction of top 1 percent income shares, by period 6.1Property in 1870 relative to 1860 (1860 = 100), for Southern whites 6.2Inequality of Southern household incomes 8.1Income shares in France, 1780–1866 11.1Share and number of taxable households in Augsburg by tax bracket, 1618 and 1646 15.1Trends in top income shares and income inequality in select countries, 1980–2010 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The gap between the haves and the have-nots has alternately grown and shrunk throughout the course of human civilization. Economic inequality may only recently have returned to great prominence in popular discourse, but its history runs deep. My book seeks to track and explain this history in the very long run. One of the first to draw my attention to this very long run was Branko Milanovic, a world expert on inequality who in his own research has reached all the way back to antiquity. If there were more economists like him, more historians would be listening. About a decade ago, Steve Friesen made me think harder about ancient income distributions, and Emmanuel Saez further piqued my interest in inequality during a shared year at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

…

I further benefited from feedback at presentations at the Evergreen State College, the Universities of Copenhagen and Lund, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. I am grateful to the organizers of these events: Ulrike Krotscheck, Peter Bang, Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Liu Jinyu, and Hu Yujuan. David Christian, Joy Connolly, Peter Garnsey, Robert Gordon, Philip Hoffman, Branko Milanovic, Joel Mokyr, Reviel Netz, Şevket Pamuk, David Stasavage, and Peter Turchin very kindly read and commented on the whole manuscript. Kyle Harper, William Harris, Geoffrey Kron, Peter Lindert, Josh Ober, and Thomas Piketty also read parts of the book. A group of historians at the Saxo Institute in Copenhagen met to discuss my manuscript, and I am particularly grateful to Gunner Lind and Jan Pedersen for their extensive input.

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Published 1 Mar 2006

was coordinated for UN-HABITAT by the Development Planning Unit at University College London.3 Secondly, it utilizes a unique comparative database for 237 cities worldwide created by the UNHABITAT Urban Indicators Programme for the 2001 Istanbul + 5 Urban Summit.4 And thirdly, it incorporates global household surveydata that breaks new ground by including China and the ex-Soviet bloc. The UN authors acknowledge a particular debt to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank economist who pioneered these surveys as a powerful microscope for studying global inequality. (In one of his papers, Milanovic explains: "For the first time in human history, researchers have reasonably accurate data on the distribution of income or welfare [expenditures or consumption] amongst more than 90 percent of the world population."5) If the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represent an unprecedented scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming, then The Challenge of Slums sounds an equally authoritative warning about the worldwide catastrophe of urban poverty.

…

Connoisseurs and flaneurs debated where human degradation was most awful: Whitechapel or 3 University College London Development Planning Unit and UN-HABITAT, Understanding Slums: Case Studiesfor the Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, available at www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report. Most of these studies are summarized in an appendix at the back of The Challenge of Slums. Missing, however, is the brilliant survey of Khartoum by Galal Eldin Eltayeb, deleted, one supposes, because of his characterization of the "Islamist, totalitarian regime." 4 See Challenge, p. 245. 5 Branko Milanovic, "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based On Household Survey Alone," working paper, World Bank, New York 1999, n.p. 6 Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 2. 7 J. A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London, London 1986, p. 5. La Chapelle, the Gorbals or the Liberties, Pig Alley or Mulberry Bend.

…

and Yerevan (Armenia).15 Likewise, the concrete-and-steel Soviet-era urban core of Ulaanbaatar is now surrounded by a sea of 500,000 or more impoverished, former pastoralists living in tents called gers, few of whom manage to eat more than once a day.16 The poorest urban populations, however, are probably found in Luanda, Maputo, Kinshasa, and Cochabamba (Bolivia), where twothirds or more of residents earn less than the cost of their minimum required daily nutrition.17 In Luanda, where one quarter of the households have per capita consumptions of less than 75 cents per day, child mortality (under five) was a horrifying 320 per thousand in 1993 — the highest in the world.18 Not all urban poor, to be sure, live in slums, nor are all slumdwellers poor; indeed, The Challenge of Slums underlines that in some cities the majority of the poor actually live outside the slums stricto sensuP Although the two categories obviously overlap in their majority, the number of urban poor is considerably greater: at least one half of the world's urban population as defined by relative national poverty thresholds.20 Approximately one quarter of urbanites (as surveyed in 1988), moreover, live in barely imaginable "absolute" poverty — somehow surviving on one dollar or less per day.21 If UN data are accurate, the household per-capita income differential between a rich 15 Christiaan Grootaert and Jeanine Braithwaite, "The Determinants of Poverty in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union," in Jeanine Braithwaite, Christiaan Grootaert, and Branko Milanovic (eds), Poverty and Social Assistance in Transition Countries, New York 2000, p. 49; UNCHS Global Indicators Database 1993. 16 Office of the Mayor, Ulaanbaatar City, "Urban Poverty Profile," submitted to World Bank, n.d., infocity.org/F2F/poverty/papers2/UB(Mongolia)%20Poverty. pdf. 17 Simon, 'Urbanization, Globalization, and Economic Crisis in Africa," p. 103; Jean-Luc Piermay, "Kinshasa: A Reprieved Mega-City?

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference
by William MacAskill
Published 27 Jul 2015

This can lead those of us who aren’t in that 1 percent to feel powerless, but this focus neglects just how much power almost any member of an affluent country has. If people focus exclusively on American inequality, they’re missing an important part of the bigger picture. Consider this graph of global income distribution: Source: Branko Milanovic, PovcalNet This graph lines up everyone in the world, ordered by their income. The space between 0 and 25 percent represents the 25 percent of the world with the smallest incomes; the space between 75 and 100 percent represents the 25 percent of the world with the largest incomes.

…

They know they’re from an affluent country, but they also know they’re not like those bankers and CEOs who make up the global elite. They therefore guess that they’re at the corner of the curve, peering up at the megarich who sit atop that spike. That’s what I used to think, too. Here’s that graph with the vertical axis labeled. Source: Branko Milanovic, PovcalNet If you earn more than $52,000 per year, then, speaking globally, you are the 1 percent. If you earn at least $28,000—that’s the typical income for working individuals in the United States—you’re in the richest 5 percent of the world’s population. Even someone living below the US poverty line, earning just $11,000 per year, is still richer than 85 percent of people in the world.

…

“probably higher than in any other society”: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 265. Consider this graph of global income distribution: The data on world income distribution is drawn from several sources. The figures for between the richest 1 percent and the richest 21 percent are based on microdata from national household surveys carried out in 2008, kindly provided by Branko Milanovic. The figures for the poorest 73 percent are based on the 2008 data from PovcalNet (http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/index.htm?1), adjusted based on the approximation that the surveys covered unbiased samples of the poorest 80 percent of the world’s population. The figure of $70,000 for the top 0.1 percent is from Milanovic’s book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

While the government had bailed out banks before, it was new and expensive for the government to rescue bank holding companies that had many assets not insured by the FDIC.12 Figure 8.1 Percentage Share of Income by Quintile, 1982–2006. (Computed from Edward Nathan Wolff, “Recent Trends in Household Wealth, 1983–2006: The Irresistible Rise of Household Debt,” Review of Economics and Institutions vol. 2 no. 1 (Winter 2001): 1–31, at 7.) Economist Branko Milanovic argues that the economic crash of 2006 was ultimately precipitated by inequality. Before the crash, the wealthiest Americans needed places to invest vast sums, and this demand called into being a supply of risky financial instruments. Middle- and low-income Americans had stagnant real wages but could maintain or improve their quality of life with easy access to credit, including subprime mortgages.

…

Leslie McCall, The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity and Redistribution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 48. 14. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, xi–xxiv, 383. 15. Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie, “Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Great Britain and the United States since 1850,” American Economic Review vol. 103 no. 4 (2013): 1109–1137. 16. Branko Milanovic, The Haves and Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 30. 17. Carole Shammas, “A New Look at Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality in the United States,” American Historical Review vol. 98 no. 2 (April 1993): 412–431. To be fair, Williamson and Lindert did acknowledge that if slaves were added to the group of wealth-holders while being kept as part of the property of their owners, measurable inequality would have been even worse in the antebellum period than economic historians’ studies suggest.

…

Barth and Apanard Penny Prabha, “An Analysis of Resolving Too-Big-to-Fail Banks throughout the United States,” The Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy vol. 44 no. 1 (2014): 1–19. 13. Fabian T. Pfeffer, Sheldon Danziger, and Robert F. Schoeni, “Wealth Disparities Before and After the Great Recession,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Society Science no. 650 (2013): 98–123. 14. Branko Milanovic, Haves and Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 196; Michael Tavel Clarke, “After the Welfare State: The New Marxism and Other Rough Beasts,” American Quarterly vol. 61 no. 1 (2009): 173–184, at 182; Michael Kumhof, Romain Ranciere, and Pablo Winant, “Inequality, Leverage and Crises,” American Economic Review vol. 105 no. 3 (2015): 1217–1245; Barry Z.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
by Robert H. Frank
Published 31 Mar 2016

Though he’d never been taught to read and write, there was almost no practical task in that environment that he couldn’t perform to a high standard. Even so, the meager salary I was able to pay him was almost certainly the high point of his life’s earnings trajectory. If he’d grown up in the United States or some other rich country, he would have been far more prosperous, perhaps even spectacularly successful. As the economist Branko Milanovic has estimated, roughly half of the variance in incomes across persons worldwide is explained by only two factors: country of residence and the income distribution within that country.4 As Napoleon Bonaparte once observed, “Ability is of little account without opportunity.” But if talent and hard work don’t guarantee material success, I hope we can all agree that success is much more likely for people with talents that are highly valued by others, and also for those with the ability and inclination to focus intently and work tirelessly.

…

,” May 7, 2011, http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/3887675/luck-is-the-real-key-to-success/#sp=show-clips. 3. Terry Gross, “Fresh Air Remembers the Crime Novelist Elmore Leonard,” National Public Radio, August 23, 2013, http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=214831379&m=214836712. 4. Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live?,” Review of Economics and Statistics 97.2 (May 2015): 452–60. 5. See, for example, Gary Marcus, “Mice, Men, and Fate,” New Yorker, May 13, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/of-mice-and-men.html. 6.

Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project
by Hans Kundnani
Published 16 Aug 2023

The ambiguity of the idea of a “return to Europe” went back to the nature of the revolutions of 1989 themselves. They are generally thought of as democratic revolutions—which of course they were. This is why many are now so baffled by the rollback of democracy in Hungary and Poland. However, as Branko Milanovic has argued, they were also nationalist revolutions whose aim was to create not just democratic but also ethnically homogenous nation states.35 After World War II, central and eastern European countries had expelled people from ethnic minorities, they had not experienced mass immigration from outside Europe in the way that western European countries had, and they did not see ethnic heterogeneity as one of the “European values” to which they were committing themselves.

…

Europe in the West (London: Verso, 2021), p. 81. 33.Rehn, “Values define Europe, not borders”. 34.On the concepts of “de-bordering” and “re-bordering”, see Frank Schimmelfennig, “Rebordering Europe: external boundaries and integration in the European Union”, Journal of European Public Policy, Volume 28, Issue 3, 2001, pp. 311–330. 35.Branko Milanovic, “Democracy of convenience, not of choice: why is Eastern Europe different”, Global Inequality, 23 December 2017, http://glineq.blogspot.com/2017/12/democracy-of-convenience-not-of-choice.html (last accessed 31 March 2023). 36.James Mark and Quinn Slobodian, “Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization”, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 351–372, here p. 352. 37.Ibid., p. 353.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

Pritchett, “Divergence, Big Time,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 3-17. 66 the ratio between the GDP of today’s richest country Achin Vanaik, “Unequal Gains,” Telegraph, December 22, 2005. 66 The world’s billionaires, those roughly one thousand individuals “The World Distribution of Household Wealth,” United Nations University—World Institute for Development Economics Research, December 5, 2006. 66 In some places, the concentration of poverty United Nations, “UN Human Development Report 2005.” 66 in the period between 1984 and 2004 Bob Davis et al., “Globalization’s Gains Come with a Price,” Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2007. 66 The World Bank’s Branko Milanovic Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 39. 67 with the Gini for all adults in the world nearly sixty-five Ibid., 108. 67 Professor James Galbraith James K. Galbraith, “By the Numbers,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002, 178-83. 68 In the last two decades, income inequality Birdsall, “The World Is Not Flat.” 68 Emmanuel Saez of the University of California Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Spring 2006, 204.

…

Even in China, which has shown such remarkable growth over the past two decades, inequality is increasing; in the period between 1984 and 2004, China’s Gini coefficient almost doubled, from 29 to 47. Disputes arise over the interpretation of these figures. One often-cited distinction is the difference between measuring inequality among the peoples of a country and inequality among all peoples. The World Bank’s Branko Milanovic has argued that measuring intracountry income gaps is a useful metric when testing the effectiveness of policies. By this measure, inequality has been on the rise for almost seven decades, with a period of “steady and sharp” increase between 1982 and 1994. Some of the lower-income countries, like those in sub-Saharan Africa, have struggled with negative per capita GDP growth for a quarter century, while the developed, free-trading countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development have seen their fortunes rise over the same period.

…

Some of those deserving of special thanks in this regard and who I am able to thank here include: Prince Turki al Faisal, Charlene Barshefsky, Senator Evan Bayh, Sandy Berger, Nancy Birdsall, Admiral Dennis Blair, Philippe Bourguignon, Lael Brainard, Hilda Ochoa Brillembourg, Leon Brittan, Steve Chase, Kurt Campbell, Vint Cerf, Heng Chee Chan, Juan Claro, Riccardo Claro, David Cole, Ibrahim Dabdoub, Richard Darman, Anita Dunn, Alejandro Foxley, Arminio Fraga, Thomas Friedman, Al From, Timothy Geithner, Jorge Gerdau Johanpeter, Louis Gerstner, Hank Greenberg, Francisco Gros, Rajat Gupta, Richard Haass, Peter Hakim, Victor Halberstadt, William Haseltine, Richard Holbrooke, Robert Hormats, General James Jones, General George Joulwan, John Judis, General John Jumper, Susan Kaufman Purcell, Robert Kimmitt, Jim Kimsey, Henry Kissinger, Anthony Lake, Jennifer Linker, Haakon Lorentzen, Edward Ludwig, Andronico Luksic, Kishore Mahbubani, Thierry Malleret, Mark Malloch Brown, Jorge Marshall, Jessica Mathews, William McDonough, Thomas F. McLarty, Branko Milanovic, Bryan Moss, Moisés Naím, Indra Nooyi, Jeff Pack, Juan Carlos Pérez Dávila, Luis Felipe Pérez Dávila, Peter Peterson, Thomas Pickering, Karen Poniachik, General Colin Powell, Geeta Rao Gupta, Philippe Reichstuhl, Susan Rice, Stephen Roach, Jorge Rosenblut, Dennis Ross, Robert Rubin, Alvaro Saieh, David Sanger, Alejandro Santo Domingo, Klaus Schwab, Bernard Schwartz, Stephen Schwarzman, General Brent Scowcroft, Walter Slocombe, Gayle Smith, Admiral Stephen Smith, Stephen Solarz, Alfred Sommer, Rob Stein, Joseph Stiglitz, Lawrence Summers, Pamela Thomas Graham, Andres Velasco, James Wolfensohn, Bob Wright, Daniel Yergin, and James Woolsey.

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future
by Ian Goldin , Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan
Published 20 Dec 2010

Although incomes in all countries have risen over the long term, economists have found that “virtually all of the observed rise in world inequality has been driven by widening gaps between nations.”23 Figure 7.2. Gini coefficient: unweighted intercountry inequality 1950-1998. Each country is one observation. Branko Milanovic. 2003. “The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It,” World Development 31(4): 667-683, p. 675, figure 3. © Elsevier Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist, illustrates this phenomenon by applying the Gini coefficient measure of inequality to the GDP per capita for 144 countries between 1950 and 1998 (see figure 7.2). Each country is treated as one unit, so China is given equal weighting to Fiji.

…

Pritchett, 2006: 32. See also World Bank. 2005. Global Economic Prospects: Economic Implications of Remittances and Migration. Washington, DC: World Bank. 18. Ibid.: 24. 19. Ibid.: 23. 20. Ibid.: 24. 21. Lant Pritchett. 1997. “Divergence, Big Time,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11(3): 3–17. 22. Branko Milanovic. 2003. “The Two Faces of Globalization: Against Globalization as We Know It,” World Development 31(4): 667–683, p. 670. 23. Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2003. “Does Globalization Make the World More Unequal?” in Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson (eds.), Globalization in Historical Perspective.

The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality
by Angus Deaton
Published 15 Mar 2013

Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, 2011, “Top incomes in the long run of history,” Journal of Economic Literature 49(1): 3–71. 16. Ibid. 17. Maarten Goos, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons, 2009, “Job polarization in Europe,” American Economic Review 99(2): 58–63. 18. Branko Milanovic, 2007, Worlds apart: Measuring international and global inequality, Princeton University Press. An important update is Branko Milanovic, 2010, “Global income inequality,” http://site​resources​.world​bank​.org​/INT​POVRES​/Resources​/477227​-1173​1085​74667​/global​_in​equality​_pre​sen​ta​tion​_milanovic​_imf​_2010.pdf. 19. Ronald Dworkin, 2000, Sovereign virtue, Harvard University Press, p. 6.

…

I am especially grateful to those who disagree with me, yet who took the time not only to criticize and persuade but also to praise and agree when they could. I am grateful to Tony Atkinson, Adam Deaton, Jean Drèze, Bill Easterly, Jeff Hammer, John Hammock, David Johnston, Scott Kostyshak, Ilyana Kuziemko, David Lam, Branko Milanovic, Franco Peracchi, Thomas Pogge, Leandro Prados de las Escosura, Sam Preston, Max Roser, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl, Alessandro Tarozzi, Nicolas van de Walle, and Leif Wenar. My editor at Princeton University Press, Seth Ditchik, helped me to get started and provided help and good advice all along the way.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Winston Churchill meditated by bricklaying. The ancient crafts of Japanese culture are performed as a meditation. The story of the relative decline in incomes for middling and lower skilled jobs, thanks to more global openness and technological change, is a familiar one. The macro picture is captured by Branko Milanovic’s famous elephant chart in which he shows the distribution of global income growth from 1988 to 2008.6 He finds the world’s poorest people, the new middle classes in poor countries, and the rich in rich countries all benefiting handsomely, while those occupying the 75th to 90th percentiles of world income distribution—essentially the West’s working and lower-middle classes—have seen their incomes stagnate.

…

Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment,” Sociology 47, no. 2 (2013), 219–50. 4 Michael Hout, “Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), 379–400, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102503. 5 Michael Hout, private correspondence. 6 Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” World Bank Economic Review 30, no. 2 (2016), 203–232. 7 David Bailey, Caroline Chapain, and Alex de Ruyter, “Employment Outcomes and Plant Closures in a Post-Industrial City: An Analysis of the Labour Market Status of MG Rover Workers Three Years On,” Urban Studies 49, no. 7 (2011), 1595–1612. 8 Tara Tiger Brown, “The Death of Shop Class and America’s Skilled Workforce,” Forbes, May 30, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/tarabrown/2012/05/30/the-death-of-shop-class-and-americas-high-skilled-workforce/#7ba6e3a0541f. 9 Conversation with the author. 10 See, for example, Office for National Statistics, Construction Statistics, Great Britain: 2017. 11 “Self-Employment Jobs by Industry,” Office for National Statistics. 12 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fe-data-library-apprenticeships. 13 https://www.citb.co.uk/documents/research/tns-2016-2017_final%2020-10-17.pdf. 14 “Migrant Labour Force Within the Construction Industry,” Office for National Statistics, June 2018. 15 “Employer Skills Survey 2017: UK Finding,” Department for Education, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/employer-skills-survey-2017-uk-report. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Educating for the Modern World, CBI/Pearson, 2018, 16–17. 19 Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The US Is Experiencing a Widespread Worker Shortage.

…

Hawkley, Rebeccah Duvoisin, Johannes Ackva et al., Loneliness in Older Adults in the USA and Germany: Measurement Invariance and Validation, NORC Working Paper Series WP-2015-004, 2016. 24 Kantar Public, “Trapped in a Bubble: An Investigation into Triggers for Loneliness in the UK,” British Red Cross/Co-op, December 2016. 25 The Forgotten Role of Families, Centre for Social Justice, 2017. 26 David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” Atlantic, March 2020. 27 Harry Benson, The Myth of “Long-term Stable Relationships” Outside Marriage, Marriage Foundation, May 2013, https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/MF-paper-Myth-of-long-term-stable-relationships-outside-marriage.pdf. 28 Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 29 Madeleine Bunting, Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care (London: Granta, 2020 [forthcoming]). 30 Interview with the author. 31 Tom De Castell, “Rise in Nurse Vacancy Rate in England Prompts Fresh Warnings,” Nursing Times, September 12, 2018; Stephanie Jones-Berry, “Why as Many as One in Four Nursing Students Could Be Dropping Out of Their Degrees,” Nursing Standard, September 3, 2018; “What Are the Vacancy Trends in the Public Sector?”

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Pope Francis, 201314 Oxfam, the leading UK-based poverty charity, has published detailed research on how Britain is brewing up a ‘perfect storm’ of social harm and unrest through growing income inequality.15 Buried deep in their report, the Oxfam researchers summarise how, according to the leading World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, ‘the real cause of the crisis lies in huge inequalities in income distribution that generated much larger investable funds than could be profitably employed’.16 By the end of 2013 even the pope was echoing the World Bank and leading poverty researchers. Oxfam explains how the International Monetary Fund has now also reached the same conclusion as the World Bank,17 suggesting that ‘any success in reducing income inequality could therefore be very useful in reducing the likelihood of future crises’.18 Oxfam deplores the fact that so far the opposite is currently happening – that, between 2007 to 2011, the ratio of FTSE 100 chief executives’ earnings to average wages rose from 92:1 to 102:1,19 and Oxfam appeared disgusted that this occurred even as real wages fell, all storing up further trouble for the future.20 They explained that a concern with ratios is not the politics of envy, but simply indicates a desire for justice.

…

In the US it is currently at a peak, but in Sweden it appears to have been falling again just as it has fallen worldwide (see Figure 6.5).45 Such claims for falling worldwide inequality are, of course, disputed; and measures of inequality that are more sensitive to the 1 per cent taking an ever greater share may not be as forgiving of extreme greed as the Gini coefficient; but inequalities within the middle of the distribution can nonetheless fall. Source: Branko Milanovic, 2012 Figure 6.5 Global and selected countries’ income inequality Gini coefficients 1966–2006 Shortly after the release of the 2012 World Bank report suggesting that global income inequality was falling, another organisation published its major findings, stating: ‘Poverty has not declined to the extent claimed and inequity has risen.’46 It may be that, between the mildly rich and the relatively poor, some equalisation is occurring.

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order
by Bruno Maçães
Published 1 Feb 2019

The Belt and Road represents a major change in developmental philosophy, an alternative development model, a complete break with the ideas now dominant in western-led institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where development is no longer seen as bricks-and-mortar building of factories and bridges, but as institution-building and policy change. As Branko Milanovic puts it, the Belt and Road proposes an activist view of development: “you need roads for farmers to bring their goods, you need fast railroads, bridges to cross the rivers, tunnels to link communities living at different ends of a mountain.” And it will not deal in any of the moralizing prescriptions about institutions, rule of law, transparency, local empowerment and so on that now dominate Western views on development.

…

Richard Fontaine and Daniel Kliman, “On China’s New Silk Road, Democracy Pays A Toll,” Foreign Policy, May 16, 2018. 21. 人民日报：推动构建人类命运共同体, 2017年11月19日05:04. 22. “How the Belt and Road Project Fills a Global Governance Vacuum,” Sixth Tone, November 12, 2017. 23. Angela Stanzel, “Fear and loathing on the New Silk Road: Chinese security in Afghanistan and beyond,” July 2018, ECFR/264. 24. Branko Milanovic, “The west is mired in ‘soft’ development. China is trying the ‘hard’ stuff,” The Guardian, May 17, 2017. 25. 国务院办公厅转发 商务部等部门关于扩大进口 促进对外贸易平衡发展意见的通知 国办, 2018, 53 号. 26. Michael Schuman, “China’s Global Ambitions Could Split the World Economy,” Bloomberg, October 26, 2017. 27. Thomas Wright, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power (Yale University Press, 2017), p. 1. 28.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

And identifying precisely which government policies guided the change is something that economists and political scientists are still arguing about. (More on that in chapter 8.) Perhaps we would know more about the Great Divergence, one third of a century after its advent, if the general topic of income distribution inspired less squeamishness. “I was once told by the head of a prestigious think tank in Washington, D.C.,” wrote Branko Milanovic, lead economist at the World Bank’s research division, in his 2011 book The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, that the think tank’s board was very unlikely to fund any work that had income or wealth inequality in its title. Yes, they would finance anything to do with poverty alleviation, but inequality was an altogether different matter.

…

See also “Biographical Note” in the NWDA online guide to the King Papers (http://nwdadb.wsulibs.wsu.edu/findaid/ark:/80444/xv64995#bioghistID). King called the minimum wage “dangerous” in the Literary Digest profile listed in General Sources. 15. In The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011), Branko Milanovic points out (pp. 7–8) that Alexis de Tocqueville made a strikingly similar observation in his 1835 Memoir on Pauperism. Equality, Tocqueville wrote, “is prevalent only at the historical poles of civilization. Savages are equal because they are equally weak and ignorant. Very civilized men can all become equal because they all have at their disposal similar means of attaining comfort and happiness.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization
by Richard Baldwin
Published 14 Nov 2016

That is, the GVC-fueled rise in the output of low-skill-intensive goods tends to lead to more imports by the developed nations. This plainly harms low-skill workers in the rich nation. Again, this is something that has happened in most advanced nations. There is, however, a more nuanced result from this sort of shift. Brilliant research by Branko Milanovic in his 2016 book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization shows what this “new winners and losers” means from a planetary perspective. His numbers look at all humans, one by one, and ignore their nationality. He lines them line up, so to speak, from the poorest to the richest.

…

For example, those who were halfway up the income distribution in 1998 would be included in the point labeled “50” (short for the fiftieth percentile). People represented by this point did pretty well. The height of the point, about 70, shows that their incomes rose by about 70 percent between 1988 and 2008. SOURCE: Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). Figure 1.1. Reproduced with permission of the publisher and the author. More Polarized Workforce Improved information technology changed the way productions tasks are organized into occupations.

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Jan 2017

But if so it seems unfair that it is discomforting the European descendants of the ‘poor bloody infantry’ rather than those who sat in the governor’s mansions. The one major group that has lost out from the most recent wave of globalisation are poorer people in rich countries. One of the most influential charts in modern economics looks at global income from 1988 to 2008—the so-called elephant curve (created by Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic)—and it shows that all groups have benefitted apart from those on middling and lower incomes in rich countries, who have seen zero income growth. Others, such as the Resolution Foundation, argue that the income stagnation for those groups was a result of domestic policy more than globalisation.10 It was, no doubt, some combination of the two but just consider the decline in decently paid manufacturing jobs in Britain in four sectors between 1995 and 2015: clothing fell from 200,000 to 70,000; leather goods from nearly 200,000 to 40,000; machinery from 400,000 to 250,000; and medical equipment from 150,000 to 30,000.11 In the longer run everyone may benefit from such shifts in economic activity, especially as consumers, but in the shorter term the adjustment costs are mainly borne by people in the bottom half of the income spectrum.

…

In the future, temporary citizens should have more limited social and political rights—corresponding to their own transactional relationship with the country—and should leave after a few years. We can then concentrate rights, benefits and integration efforts (such as language tuition) on those who are making a full commitment to the country. There is a trade-off, as academics like Martin Ruhs and Branko Milanovic have argued, between migration and citizenship. If we want to continue with relatively high inflows we have to ring-fence the welfare state and full citizenship more jealously. Britain became a mass immigration society, much as it became an imperial one, in a fit of absence of mind. The political class must now realise that managing that better is at the heart of what a modern state offers.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

That hole tells the story of the majority of people in America, Japan and Europe – they gained almost nothing from capitalism in the past twenty years. In fact, some of them lost out. That dip below zero is likely to include black America, poor white Britain and much of the workforce of southern Europe. Branko Milanovic, the economist who prepared these figures for the World Bank, called this ‘probably the profoundest global reshuffle of people’s economic positions since the industrial revolution’.45 11. Doubling the world’s workforce The Harvard economist Richard Freeman calculated that between 1980 and 2000, the world’s workforce doubled in absolute numbers, halving the ratio of capital to labour.46 Population growth and foreign investment boosted the workforce of the developing world, urbanization created a 250-million-strong working class in China, while the former Comecon countries’ workforces were suddenly available to the global market.

…

A stunning half of all the projected population growth between now and 2050 will take place in just eight countries,* six of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.19 To find jobs, people from the population-boom countries will migrate to the cities; the land, as we’ve seen, is already under stress from climate change. In the cities, many will join the world’s slum-dwelling population, which already stands at a billion – and increasing numbers will attempt illegal migration to the rich world.20 The World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, surveying the huge and growing inequality in developing countries, calls this a ‘non-Marxian world’ in which location, not class, is responsible for two-thirds of all inequality.’21 His conclusion: ‘either poor countries will become richer or poor people will migrate to rich countries’. But for poor countries to become richer, they must break out of the so-called ‘middle-income trap’ – where countries typically develop to a certain point and then stall; both because they have to compete with the old imperial powers and because their corrupt elites strangle the emergence of functional modern institutions.

Arrival City
by Doug Saunders
Published 22 Mar 2011

David Rothkopf, a scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described this neglect as a large-scale mistake: “With the notable exceptions of India and China and a few others, which show some heartening middle-class growth, we are doing a very bad job of building the middle classes, which are the foundation of stability and the antidote to the boom-bust cycles that bedevil much of the emerging world.”9 To explain the nature of this challenge, it is important to understand what we mean—and what rural-to-urban migrants mean—by “middle class.” One way to define a middle class is by identifying the middle-income range: you pick out those families that earn between 75 percent and 150 percent of a country’s median income. The economist Branko Milanovic did this for the entire world, dividing all 6.7 billion people into a “lower class”—which turned out to be those whose annual family incomes were below $4,000 annually, the median income of Brazil—and an “upper class,” those families with more than $17,000 a year, the median income of Italy.

…

For a review of the literature demonstrating the importance of a middle class in maintaining stability and promoting democracy and prosperity, see Steven Pressman, “The Decline of the Middle Class: An International Perspective,” Journal of Economic Issues XLI, no. 1 (2007). 8 Guedes and Oliveira, “Braudel Papers 38.” 9 David Rothkopf, “Pain in the Middle,” Newsweek International, Nov. 21, 2005. 10 Branko Milanovic, “Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does the World Have a Middle Class?” Review of Income and Wealth 48, no. 2 (2002). 11 Rasheeda Bhagat, “A One-Billion Middle-Class Deluge from India, China by 2020,” The Hindu Business Line, Jun. 29, 2006. For a similar analysis using different consumer data, see Diana Farrell, Ulrich A.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

The crisis of 2007–9 onwards made matters worse: ‘The top 100 billionaires added $240 billion to their wealth in 2012 – enough to end world poverty four times over.’2 Billionaires have erupted all over the place, with large numbers now recorded in Russia, India, China, Brazil and Mexico, as well as in the more traditionally wealthy countries in North America, Europe and Japan. One of the more significant shifts is that the ambitious no longer have to migrate to the affluent countries to become billionaires – they can simply stay at home in India (where the number of billionaires has more than doubled over the last few years), Indonesia or wherever. As Branko Milanovic concludes, we are witnessing the rise of a global plutocracy in which global power ‘is held by a relatively small number of very rich people’.3 The threat to the contradictory unity between production and realisation in the global economy is palpable. Yet by other measures the world is a much more equal place than it once was.

…

Contradiction 12: Disparities of Income and Wealth 1. Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, ‘Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 6, 2011, p. 9. 2. Oxfam, ‘The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All’, Oxfam Media Briefing, 18 January 2013. 3. Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 149. 4. Craig Calhoun, ‘What Threatens Capitalism Now?’, in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have a Future?

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

Let’s talk about the billion who may be the first to show up. PART III * * * ECONOMY Chapter 6 WEALTH The Miracle of Start-up Societies We Are the 1 Percent (And So Are You) If you can afford to buy this book, you may be in the 1 percent. According to former World Bank lead economist Branko Milanovic, if you’re single and make more than $34,000 US after taxes, you’re a member of the global 1 percent. Take a moment to contemplate where you reside along this graph. Based on a graph by Toby Ord. This graph is evidence of inequality. It’s also evidence of a humanitarian singularity. For most of history, the vast majority of people resided in the bottom part of the graph, and virtually nobody, not even kings and emperors, could imagine the upper part of this graph.

…

Unless noted otherwise noted, all quotes from Masaki Takeuchi were taken from interviews with the author. As Yoichi Miyamoto, president of Shimizu Corporation, wrote in the Shimizu 2012 Social Responsibility Report: www.shimz.co.jp/english/theme/dream/greenfloat.html. Chapter 6. WEALTH: The Miracle of Start-up Societies $34,000 US after taxes: Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011). “Next to this mysterious black hole”: Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009), 3–5. “Between 1946 and the beginning of the Korean War”: Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 161.

Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
by Tyler Cowen
Published 15 Oct 2018

Koopmans, Tjalling. 1960. “Stationary Ordinal Utility and Impatience.” Econometrica 28: 287–309. Kydland, Finn E., and Edward C. Prescott. 1977. “Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans.” Journal of Political Economy 85, no. 3 (June): 473–492. Lakner, Christoph, and Branko Milanovic. 2014. “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession.” VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal. Accessed 27 May. Lane, Robert E. 1998. “The Joyless Market Economy.” In Economics, Values, and Organization, edited by Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman, 461–490. New York: Cambridge University Press.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

This persistence is perhaps the key link to sociopolitical tension in that continued inequality conditions people’s long-term expectations of the world around them. The political consequence is that people form a view that the system is against them and vote against the system. Evidence from a range of sources—the World Bank, OECD, and Branko Milanovic, a leading academic in the areas of development economics and inequality—shows that across the developed world inequality is high, with the United States and South Africa in the lead in this respect, followed by Turkey, Chile, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Spain.17 Among other countries, Sweden has become slightly less equal though its Gini coefficient is nonetheless at a very low level, close to that of France, the Netherlands, and Canada.

…

In fact, between 2010 and 2017, growth in per capita real income was easily the lowest in over sixty years. This is a useful way of picking up the sense that people feel much less well off, especially those who may have been working long enough to recall periods of stronger income growth. In the developing world the picture is somewhat different, reflecting Branko Milanovic’s assertion that though inequality has in many cases increased within countries, it has narrowed when between-country relationships are accounted for. Here the positive effects of globalization are the clearest: it, together with national growth dynamics, has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty into relative prosperity.19 More generally, in the last twenty years wealth and incomes have exploded in many emerging countries so that sensitivity to inequality is lower.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

At the same time, people at the top go from riding in horse-drawn broughams to boarding private jets. So would China have been better off remaining in the year 1990? Ideal would have been the same reduction of poverty minus the inequality, but this may not be possible, at least in today’s world. Branko Milanovic, a Serbian-born economist at City University of New York, whose academic specialty is inequality research, says, “In China, less poverty and more inequality were part and parcel of each other. Probably there would have been no way to get the economic growth without the increased inequality and opportunities for corruption.”

…

In 2017, the Wall Street Journal quoted seventy-nine-year-old Carole Siesser: Joseph Walker, “Surging Drug Costs,” Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2107. By the end of the Obama administration, according to the Congressional Budget Office: “Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes” (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, 2016). Milanovic’s research shows: Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots (New York: Basic Books, 2010). according to the Economic Policy Institute, think tank of the US labor movement: Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder, “CEO Pay Remains High Relative to Pay of Typical Workers” (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2017). Nike pays the Indonesian workers who sew the company’s sneakers $3 a day: Bonnie Kavoussi, “Nike Factory in Indonesia Used Military to Intimidate Workers into Giving Up Pay,” Huffington Post, January 16, 2013.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

Here, I want to acknowledge the collaboration with my Columbia colleagues Bruce Greenwald and Jose Antonio Ocampo, and the work of the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly, which I chaired.6 Anyone working in the area of inequality today also owes a great debt to Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, whose painstaking work has produced so much of the data that reveals the extent of inequality at the top in the U.S. and many other advanced countries. Other leading scholars whose influence will be seen here include Francois Bourgignon, Branko Milanovic, Paul Krugman, and James Galbraith.7 When Cullen Murphy, then an editor at The Atlantic Monthly, persuaded me to write an article on some of my experiences at the White House (in an article, “The Roaring Nineties,” which eventually led to my second book for a more popular audience),8 it provided not only an opportunity to articulate ideas I had been pondering for some years but also a new challenge: Could I address complex ideas in a succinct way that would make them widely accessible?

…

Is the gap between countries narrowing, as rising economic powers like China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty? And within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one? These are complex questions, and new research by a World Bank economist named Branko Milanovic, along with other scholars, points the way to some answers. Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America. Of course, inequality within these countries was appalling—think of the textile mills of Liverpool and Manchester, England, in the 1820s, and the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the South Side of Chicago in the 1890s—but the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age
by James Crabtree
Published 2 Jul 2018

Indian government data also often focused on consumption, a measure that gave the country a middling position in global rankings of inequality, rather than income or wealth. More recent research has proved beyond doubt the depths of India’s social divide. Churning through new data in 2016, Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank, found India had higher income inequality levels than America, Brazil, and Russia, leaving it “more egalitarian than only South Africa,” a country famous for its jarring stratification.43 Other surveys found similar results.44 An IMF working paper from the same year showed that India had one of the highest and fastest-growing inequality rates in Asia.45 Its score on the Gini index—a measure of inequality where 0 means total equality and 100 total inequality—rose from 45 in 1990 to 51 in 2013.

…

Bhagwati and Panagariya, Why Growth Matters, pp. 44–55. 40. Jagdish Bhagwati, “Scaling Up the Gujarat Model,” The Hindu, September 20, 2014. 41. Drèze and Sen, An Uncertain Glory, ch. 1. 42. Amartya Sen, “Quality of Life: India vs. China,” New York Review of Books, May 12, 2011. 43. Branko Milanovic, “The Question of India’s Inequality,” globalinequality blog, May 7, 2016. 44. Nisha Agrawal, “Inequality in India: What’s the Real Story?” World Economic Forum, October 3, 2016. 45. Jain-Chandra et al., “Sharing the Growth Dividend.” 46. Global Wealth Report 2016. 47. Chakravarty and Dehejia, “India’s Income Divergence.” 48.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

Pablo Mitnik, Erin Cumberworth, and David Grusky, “Social Mobility in a High-Inequality Regime,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 663, no. 1 (January 2016): pp. 140–84. 19. See, for example, Uri Dadush, Kemal Dervis, Sarah Milsom, and Bennett Stancil, Inequality in America: Facts, Trends, and International Perspectives (Brookings Institution Press, 2012); and Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2016). 20. Markus Jäntti, Knut Roed, Robin Naylor, Anders Bjorklund, Bernt Bratsberg, Oddbjorn Raaum, Eva Osterbacka, and Tor Eriksson, “American Exceptionalism in a New Light: A Comparison of Intergenerational Earnings Mobility in the Nordic Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States,” Working Paper 1938 (Bonn, Germany: IZA, January 2006) (http://ftp.iza.org/dp1938.pdf).

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

Martin’s Press, 2020); Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, by Alec MacGillis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, by Matt Stoller (Simon and Schuster, 2020); and “What Happened to Social Mobility in America?,” by Branko Milanovic (Foreign Affairs, January 8, 2021). Some ideas for democratic renewal draw on Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, co-chaired by Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu. The story of Doug Sweet is told in “One Trump Fan’s Descent into the U.S.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

Moreover, the vast majority of the population within the Roman Empire’s border were not citizens; a Claudian census of 47 ad counted seven million Romans, so it might be safe to assume that on average the balance of noncitizens might have had annual incomes similar to those who lived in the underdeveloped nations decades or centuries ago, before there were any modern inventions, where a living was scratched off the land with primitive implements. (Note that women were not counted as citizens.) Estimates by Branko Milanovic, the lead economist in the World Bank’s research department, peg 85 percent of 268 ENDLESS MONEY the citizen, noncitizen, and slave populations of the Roman Empire at having an income of merely 234 HS annually, with this wage coming from a subsistence farming existence.19 While the absolute number of troops in the U.S. forces are a bit more than double the standing Roman army, the U.S. population that we draw from is five to eight times as large, and these are all citizens.

…

Murphy credits Edward Luttwak, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, for analysis of Roman military strategy in his book, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978). 18. Ibid., 67. 19. Branko Milanovic, Roman Empire 14 CE – A Social Table, November 10, 2007, http://gpih.ucdavis.edu/files/Roman_Empire_14CE.pdf . 20. NATO Handbook, 2006, p. 247, http://www.nato.int/docu/handbook/2006/ hb-en-2006.pdf. 21. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Genesis Journeys: Tower of Power, Audio CD 2008, rabbidaniellapin.com. 22.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

.… Explanations pointing out that periods of technological revolutions such as the last part of the nineteenth century (industrial revolutions) or the end of the twentieth century (computer revolution) are more favourable to the making of fortunes than other periods might also be relevant.”81 This is also the favored interpretation of the economist Branko Milanovic, who has recently put forward the idea of Kuznets waves accompanying every new technological revolution. His work does indeed show that the trajectory of inequality in Britain during the Industrial Revolution looks astoundingly similar to that of the computer revolution in America.82 However, such an interpretation immediately raises the question of why American inequality during the Second Industrial Revolution seemingly followed a different pattern.

…

In 2017, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a report showing that “technological advancement, measured by the long-term change in the relative price of investment goods, together with the initial exposure to routinization, have been the largest contributors to the decline in labor income shares in advanced economies.”40 Consistent with the hollowing out of labor markets, as computer-controlled machines have taken over the jobs of the middle class, the IMF found that the decline in labor shares has been particularly sharp for middle-skilled workers. The changing face of technology is also reflected in long-run trends in the Gini coefficient (figure 14). As Branko Milanovic has noted, “This revolution [the computer revolution], like the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century, widened income disparities.”41 These periods were not only times when the profit share of income reached historical heights and the wages of ordinary citizens were stagnant.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes
by Phillip Brown , Hugh Lauder and David Ashton
Published 3 Nov 2010

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22, no. 2 (2008): 3–28; Dominic Wilson and Raluca Dragusanu, The Notes to Pages 123–130 181 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. Expanding Middle: The Exploding World Middle Class and Falling Global Inequality, Goldman Sachs, Global Economic Paper No. 170 (2008). This definition was developed by Branko Milanovic and Shlomo Yitzhaki. “Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does the World Have a Middle Class?” Review of Income and Wealth, 48, no. 2 (2002): 155–178. Italy’s per capita is used as the upper limit because it has the lowest per capita income in the G7, and Brazil represents the lower threshold because its per capital income is close to the official poverty line in the United States and Germany (about $PPP 10 a day).

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

Albert Hirschman, “The changing tolerance for income inequality in the course of economic development,” World Development, vol. I, issue 12, December 1973. Angus Deaton alerted me to this idea: www.sciencedirect.com. 14. Angus Deaton in conversation with the author, July 2016. 15. Martin Wolf, review of Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Harvard University Press, 2016, in Financial Times, April 14, 2016. 16. Inequality of wealth (see chapter 9) is almost always higher than inequality of income because advantages and disadvantages accumulate over time. 17.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

See Rob van Tulder and Winfried Ruigrok, “European Cross-National Production Networks in the Auto Industry: Eastern Europe as the Low End of European Car Complex,” Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, Working Paper 121, 1998, p. 3. 116 Michael J. Haynes, “Labour, Exploitation and Capitalism in Russia Before and After 1991,” Critical Sociology 34: 4 (2008), p. 571. See also Branko Milanovic, Income Inequality and Poverty during the Transition from Planned Economy to Market Economy, Washington, DC: World Bank, 1998. 117 Gowan, Global Gamble, pp. 191, 241. 118 See Michael S. Minor, “The Demise of Expropriation as an Instrument of LDC Policy, 1980–1992,” Journal of International Business Studies 25: 1 (1994), Table 1, p. 180. 119 Thomas W.

…

Available at nsf.gov. 6 Martin Hart-Landsberg and Paul Burkett, “China and the Dynamics of International Accumulation: Causes and Consequences of Global Restructuring,” Historical Materialism 14: 3 (2006), p. 4. 7 Asian Development Bank, Emerging Asian Regionalism: A Partnership for Shared Prosperity, Manila: ADB, 2008, pp. 8, 16, 23. 8 Francisco H. G. Ferreira and Martin Ravallion, “Global Poverty and Inequality: A Review of the Evidence,” World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper 4623, May 2008, pp. 10–14. See also Branko Milanovic, “An Even Higher Global Inequality than Previously Thought,” World Bank, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, MPRA Paper No. 6676, Washington, December 2007. Available at mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de. 9 Quoted in Baker, Group of Seven, p. 212. 10 This term was initially coined by G7 policymakers in the wake of the Mexican crisis.

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality
by Roland Berger , David Grusky , Tobias Raffel , Geoffrey Samuels and Chris Wimer
Published 29 Oct 2010

Whether the level of additional taxation is an appropriate governmental 4 Bertelsmann Foundation, Arbeitsmarkt und Beschäftigung in Deutschland 2000-2009, 2009, p. 10. 5 “Does Liberté = Egalité? A Survey of the Empirical Links Between Democracy and Inequality with some Evidence on the Transition Economies,” Mark Gradstein (Ben Gurion University), Branko Milanovic (The World Bank), Journal of Economic Surveys, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2004. 198 R. Berger response is an entirely separate issue from how robust democracies respond to public concerns. Indeed, a sense of fairness and just process is more important than inequality, because when the public believes the system unfairly rewards individuals or opportunities for advancement are blocked, severe social stress can appear.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

Most opinion would regard them as “deserving” of exceptional rewards.’ Yet the evidence is that an increasing proportion of today’s super-rich fall into the category of the ‘undeserving rich’, a group ‘who rig the system to enrich themselves by unfairly grabbing a larger size of the cake at the expense of someone else.’358 The World Bank economist, Branko Milanovic, has used a similar distinction between what he calls ‘good’ and ‘bad inequality’. 359 Personal fortunes that arise from exceptional personal risk-taking, innovation and merit are examples of good inequality. Today, most of the wealth gap is arguably the product of bad inequality. Although there are plenty of individual examples of the modern tycoon taking big personal financial risks to help improve productive potential and spread opportunities, a growing proportion of trading activities, big business deals and accountancy practices of recent times have involved less a process of value creation that would have increased economic strength, and more a diversion and change of ownership of existing value and wealth.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

Goos, Maarten, Alan Manning, and Anna Salomons. 2014. “Explaining Job Polarization: Routine-Biased Technical Change and Offshoring.” American Economic Review 104 (8) (August): 2509–2526. Gordon, Robert J. 2015. “Secular Stagnation: A Supply-Side View.” American Economic Review 105 (5) (May): 54–59. Gornick, Janet C., and Branko Milanovic. 2015. “Income Inequality in the United States in Cross-National Perspective: Redistribution Revisited.” Luxembourg Income Study Center Research Brief (1/2015), May 4. Gottschalk, Marie. 2015. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

But between 1979 and 2009, productivity rose by 80 per cent, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4 per cent.4 In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1 per cent rose by 270 per cent.5 In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12 per cent between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest tenth rose by 37 per cent.6 The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from twenty-six in 1979 to forty in 2009.7 In his book The Haves and the Have-Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived.8 Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots’ labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

Data, however, need to be transformed, mainly by theory, into narratives to be comprehensible and persuasive. For that, of course, we are beholden to many who have preceded us, for example, the literature kicked off by Bill Phillips in Chapter 8 on the relationship between slack in the labour market and wages growth, and the work on inequality undertaken by Branko Milanovic in Chapter 7. We are particularly grateful to Carol Jagger for correcting an error in our work on Dependency and Dementia and to Camilla Cavendish for her guidance in Chapter 4, and to Carol Jagger and her co-authors, for permission to reproduce Tables from the PACSim modelling study; and Chris Lynch and Alzheimer’s Disease International for permission to reprint Tables from various World Alzheimer Reports.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

It is precisely because of this ambiguity surrounding the top 10%, the fact they are both privileged and mostly dependent on their work to make a living, that we decided to focus on them rather than on owners of wealth more directly, who are much more likely to align themselves with the interests of capital. By the same token, we acknowledge the increasing number of high earners in Britain who are also owners of the most wealth. Inequality expert Branko Milanovic tweeted: “your neighbourly CEO […] is in the top 1% by labor income and also in the top 1% by [the] shares he owns.”25 Anti-elitism, precarity, automation and higher costs of living also risk undermining the social and economic status of the top income decile. Our interviews revealed some veiled anxieties.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

(New York: Norton, 2012); Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York: Norton, 2009); and Krugman, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century (New York: Norton, 2003); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999); Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” September 14, 2009, available at http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/ documents/rapport_anglais.pdf. 25.

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies
by Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer
Published 14 Apr 2013

Achim Steiner, “Rehabilitating Nature-Based Assets Generates Jobs, Wealth and Restoration of Multi-Trillion Dollar Services,” press release, UNEP, June 3, 2010, www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=628&ArticleID=6596&l=en (accessed December 9, 2012). 22. The richest 1 percent of the world’s adult population have incomes higher than US$500,000; Davies et al., “Estimating the Level and Distribution of Global Household Wealth.” 23. Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality: What It Is and Why It Matters,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, working paper no. 26 (2006), www.wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2006/03/02/ 000016406_20060302153355/Rendered/PDF/wps3865.pdf (accessed December 9, 2012), 9. 24. FAO, The State of Food Security in the World, Executive Summary, Rome, Italy, 2012, www.fao.org/hunger/en/ (accessed December 9, 2012), 2. 25.

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

,” Bild, October 27, 2010; Stefan Wagstyl, “Greeks Find Support for German Reparations Claims—in Germany,” Financial Times, March 17, 2015; Mehreen Khan and Paul McLean, “Dijsselbloem under Fire after Saying Eurozone Countries Wasted Money on ‘Alcohol and Women,’” Financial Times, March 21, 2017. 7. John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (New York: James Pott, 1902). See also Thomas Hauner, Branko Milanovic, and Suresh Naidu, “Inequality, Foreign Investment, and Imperialism,” Stone Center Working Paper 2017, for a modern quantitative analysis of Hobson’s thesis. 8. Kenneth Austin, “Communist China’s Capitalism: The Highest Stage of Capitalist Imperialism,” World Economics, January–March 2011, 79–94.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

‘Trump’s tariff war is the final act of a broken system’ (Huffington Post, July 22). 40 https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Enlightenment-Now. 41 Peter Bakvis, 2017. ‘Orthodoxy, evidence and action: Labour rights at the World Bank.’ International Union Rights 24(1): 3–5. 42 Hickel, The Divide, 173. See also McGoey, No Such Thing as a Free Gift, as well as this article from former World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, who makes similar points about the political way that Gates and Pinker use self-pleasing statistics to defend rigid ideological positions: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/11/02/2019/global-poverty-over-long-term-legitimate-issues. 43 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin Classics, 2017), 282. 44 Peter Bakvis, 2018.

Rogue States
by Noam Chomsky
Published 9 Jul 2015

Montreal Meeting (First Extraordinary Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to Finalize and Adopt a Protocol on Biosafety—Resumed Session) (2000), Andrew Pollack, “130 Nations Agree on Safety Rules for Biotech Food,” NYT, Jan. 30, 2000; Pollack, “Talks on Biotech Food Turn on a Safety Principle,” NYT, Jan. 28, 2000. 17. Edward Herman, “Corporate Junk Science in the Media,” Z magazine, Jan. and Feb. 1999. 18. World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, cited in Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer 93, Feb. 2000. About the Author © Don Usner Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy in the world. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

” — Joseph Stiglitz Perhaps US citizens appalled by the state of inequality in their country should feel better about the fact that inequality for the whole world is far worse than some of the most unequal countries in it. By virtue of being a citizen of one of the richest countries on the planet, even the avocado-toast-eating millennial priced out of the housing market can feel satisfied that they are part of the global elite. According to the latest global income estimates from Branko Milanovic, the global Gini coefficient (a widely used measure of inequality that goes from 0 to 1, the former being perfectly equal and the latter perfectly unequal societies) came in at 0.63 in 2013 (Figure 6.12). This would put it around the levels of Haiti and South Africa, the only countries in the world with Gini coefficients over 0.60.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

‘Of all the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution,’ wrote the influential economist Robert Lucas in 2004.14 For most of the last 20 years at the World Bank, according to one of its lead economists, Branko Milanovic, ‘even the word inequality was not politically acceptable, because it seemed like something wild or socialist’.15 For others, the acceptable degree of social inequality came to be a matter of personal or political preference – as Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair quipped of the UK’s top footballer, ‘It’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.’16 Over the past decade, however, perspectives on inequality have shifted dramatically as its systemically damaging effects – social, political, ecological and economic – have become all too clear.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

But national averages, which look only at inequality between countries are not fully adequate measures given that there is great inequality within many countries—and especially in the rapidly growing countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (called the BRICs), which have made such a big difference in the middle parts of the global income distribution.15 Branko Milanovic reports that about two-thirds of global inequality currently is due to differences in income levels between countries, a big shift from the nineteenth-century pattern, when only 15 percent of measured inequality was due to national differences, and 85 percent due to income inequality within countries.16 Another way of assessing inequality suggested by this pattern is to look at what has happened to individual incomes across the world.17 The incomes of the Forbes Rich List have soared massively ahead of those of people living in the poorest African countries whose economies have been shrinking.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Burns and H. L. A. Hart, eds., 1977, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 393. 10.  John Cunningham Wood, ed., 1993, Alfred Marshall: Critical Assessments, Volume IV, London: Routledge, p. 290. 11.  Branko Milanovic, 2016, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 166. 12.  Pew Research Center, 2015, ‘The American Middle Class is Losing Ground: No Longer the Majority and Falling Behind Financially’, 9 December; www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ 13.  

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart, eds., 1977, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 393. 10. John Cunningham Wood, ed., 1993, Alfred Marshall: Critical Assessments, Volume IV, London: Routledge, p. 290. 11. Branko Milanovic, 2016, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 166. 12. Pew Research Center, 2015, ‘The American Middle Class is Losing Ground: No Longer the Majority and Falling Behind Financially’, 9 December; www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/ 13.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

Beware of the ‘Free’ Gifts of Socialism, America,” Fox Business, November 5, 2021, https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/build-back-better-free-gifts-socialism-fred-sievert. 33. “McCain, Palin Hint That Obama’s Policies Are ‘Socialist,’” CNN, 2008, https://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/18/campaign.wrap/. 34. Marco Ranaldi and Branko Milanovic, “Capitalist Systems and Income Inequality,” VoxEU, December 3, 2020, https://voxeu.org/article/capitalist-systems-and-income-inequality. 35. Robert Faturechi, “The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes,” Minnesota Reformer, July 15, 2021, https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/07/15/the-billionaire-playbook-how-sports-owners-use-their-teams-to-avoid-millions-in-taxes/. 36.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

See Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, “Capital Is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 3 (2014): 1255–1310; Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 131, no. 2 (2016): 519–578; Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Lawrence H. Summers, “US Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound,” Business Economics 49, no. 2 (2014): 65–73. 22. Eliana Dockterman, “NYC Mayor to Skip Hillary Clinton Launch Event,” Time, June 10, 2015, http://time.com/3916983/bill-de-blasio-hillary-clinton-campaign-launch-nyc/. 23.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’, in ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’, in Martin Greenberger (ed.), Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Johns Hopkins Press 1971 Movement of skilled workers: see Dani Rodrik, ‘Premature Deindustrialization’, NBER Working Paper 20935, 2015 Modern divergences in mortality and health: cf. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, ‘Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2017 Gated communities: see Branko Milanovic, ‘The Welfare State in the Age of Globalization’, http://glineq.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-welfare-state-in-age-of.html Capacity of companies to bully cities, states: Cf. e.g. Olivia Solon, ‘How Uber conquers a city in seven steps’, Guardian, 12 April 2017; Deborah Haynes and Marcus Leroux, ‘Boeing has power to turn off planes say British military chiefs’, The Times, 28 September 2017 Limitations of economics: two projects aiming to address different limitations are the Rebuilding Macroeconomics Network at the UK’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and the CORE Economics Education programme directed by Wendy Carlin (http://www.core-econ.org).

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. Notes Introduction: Asia First 1 Only the African Group in the United Nations has more members with fifty-four. Asia is home to 2,301 spoken languages, and Africa ranks second with just over 2,100 languages. 2 Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality by the Numbers: In History and Now—An Overview,” World Bank Policy Research Paper no. 6259, November 2012, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/959251468176687085/pdf/wps6259.pdf. 3 Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West (New York: Steerforth Press, 2001). 4 Asian Development Bank, Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific, 2015 (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 2015), https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/175162/ki2015.pdf. 5 Homi Kharas, “The Unprecedented Expansion of the Global Middle Class: An Update,” Global Economy & Development Working Paper no. 100, Brookings Institution, February 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf. 6 Since most ancient cultures thought of themselves as the center of the world, Asian civilizations had names for one another but no word for “Asia.”

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 14 Aug 2013

Quigley, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006, pp. 221–58; Facundo Alvaredo and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Income and Wealth Concentration in Spain from a Historical and Fiscal Perspective’, Journal of the European Economic Association 7:5, 2009, pp. 1140–67; Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Top Incomes in the Long Run of History’, Journal of Economic Literature 49:1, 2011, pp. 3–71. 23 Simon Kuznets, ‘Economic Growth and Income Inequality’, American Economic Review 45:1, 1955. 24 Branko Milanovic has produced innovative work that assesses global inequality by measuring within-country as well as across-country inequality. The top 10 percent of the income distribution in a poor developing country, after all, might have a lower average income than the bottom 10 percent of a rich developed country.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
by Parag Khanna
Published 4 Mar 2008

.: Lynne Rienner, 1995); and Stephen D. Krasner, Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 38. On the bifurcation of the international economic order and upward/downward mobility within it as a result of globalization, see Branko Milanovic, Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), ch. 7. 39. One measure of progress up the ladder of modernity is “stateness.” Stateness refers to a government’s capacity to enforce its power, ranging from minimal functions (public goods, property rights, defense) to intermediate functions (addressing externalities, education, regulation, social insurance) to more activist roles (industrial policy, wealth redistribution).

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

The touchstone of morality in a global society is leveraging connectedness for utilitarian ends: achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of people. We must apply John Rawls’s test of societal morality on a global scale, judging ourselves by how we treat those at the bottom and justifying inequality to the extent that it improves the lives of the poorest. There is still potential to turn what the economist Branko Milanovic calls “bad” inequality into “good” inequality, which motivates and enables efforts for achievement. We are, in fact, on the right track: Globalization and connectivity have improved the quality of life for billions of people even if they have also made high inequality inevitable. The time has come for even bolder thinking about how to leverage near-total connectivity to advance large-scale human development.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Paul Vallely, “How Islamic inventors changed the world”, The Independent, March 11th 2006 25. Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, op. cit. 26. Frankopan, The Silk Roads, op. cit. 27. Keay, China: A History, op. cit. 28. Greg Clark, Global Cities: A Short History 29. Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500 30. Ibid. 31. Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization 32. It is striking how these areas in the middle kingdom were still the subject of territorial dispute in the 20th century. 33. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, op. cit. Chapter 4 – Europe revives: 1000–1500 1. Smil, Energy and Civilization, op. cit. 2.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

Note that Maddison’s historical series are concerned solely with the flow of output (GDP, population, and GDP per capita) and say nothing about national income, the capital-labor split, or the stock of capital. On the evolution of the global distribution of output and income, see also the pioneering work of François Bourguignon and Branko Milanovic. See the online technical appendix. 21. The series presented here go back only as far as 1700, but Maddison’s estimates go back all the way to antiquity. His results suggest that Europe began to move ahead of the rest of the world as early as 1500. By contrast, around the year 1000, Asia and Africa (and especially the Arab world) enjoyed a slight advantage.