Quotes from Branko Milanovi?

To believe that the rich do not use their money to buy influence and promote policies they like is not simply to be naïve. Such a stance contradicts the key principles of economics as well as the ways in which the rich people have amassed their wealth—surely not by throwing it around while expecting no return on it.

Education may not have much influence on what happens because many rich societies are already near the upper limit in terms of quantity of education (measured by the number of years of schooling) and possibly even in terms of quality of schooling that can be offered; in addition, many of those employed in service jobs are already overqualified for what they do.

It is hard to imagine that a system with such high inequality could be politically stable.

If the losers remain disorganized and subject to false consciousness, not much will change. If they do organize themselves and find political champions who could tap into their resentment and get their votes, then it might be possible for the rich countries to put into place policies that would set them on the downward path of the second Kuznets wave.

The fact that the entire globe now operates according to the same economic princi­ples—­production or­ga­nized for profit using legally ­free wage labor and mostly privately owned capital, with decentralized coordination—is without historical pre­ce­dent.

The ability to move up the ladder was precisely the image, and might also have been the reality, of the United States in the nineteenth century and perhaps most of the twentieth.

In China, the main offsetting forces—that is, those that may keep inequality high—are the increased share of income coming from private capital, corruption, and regional income gaps. In the United States, those forces are the heavy concentration of capital in the hands of the rich, the unification of high capital and labor incomes in the same people (the "new capitalism"), and the political power of the rich.

Already, among the top 10 percent of wage-earners, we cannot identify differences in observable characteristics (education, experience) that could explain why salaries between the top 1 percent and the remaining 9 percent differ by a factor of ten or more (Piketty 2014, chap. 9).

So a child's path is already determined by age five, provided his or her parents have enough knowledge, foresight, and indeed money. Very few poor or less educated parents have the resources or knowledge to make these choices so early on.

Those who care exclusively about "identities" aim to place everybody on the same starting line but do not care that some come to the starting line with Ferraris and others with bicycles.

It is the reneging on some crucial aspects of this implicit value system, namely a movement toward the creation of a self-perpetuating upper class and polarization between the elites and the rest, that represents the most important threat to the longer-term viability of liberal capitalism.

Their predictions generally consisted of simple extensions of current trends, some of which had been in existence for only five or ten years and quickly disappeared.

What determines inequality among individuals within a single nation? Are there certain regularities that make inequality behave in a particular way as societies develop?