I really don't think we've become a plutocracy, but I worry about the enormous influence that money has in a democracy such as ours.
Although globalization and technological change have disrupted traditional work arrangements, both processes have the potential to benefit everyone. The fact that they have not suggests that the wealthy have captured the benefits for themselves.
I, who do not believe in socialized health-care, would advocate a single-payment system... because it will get this monster that we've created out of the economy and allow the rest of capitalism to flourish without the awful things that healthcare is doing to us.
Putting, say, an 85 per cent income tax rate is unlikely to bring in much revenue.
Broadly shared progress can be achieved with policies that are designed specifically to benefit consumers and workers. And such policies need not even include redistributive taxation, which many workers oppose. Rather, they can focus on ways to encourage competition and discourage rent-seeking.
Economic growth is very important, but it is not the only thing, and it must be accompanied by sharing with those who are left behind, through effective social services and provision.
I do worry about a world in which the rich get to write the rules.
I think there are a lot of policies that have been unfriendly to workers' wages.
A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things.
I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.
Like many in academia and in the development industry, I am among globalization's greatest beneficiaries - those who are able to sell our services in markets that are larger and richer than our parents could have dreamed of.
It's hard to think that Mark Zuckerberg is actually impoverishing anyone by getting rich with Facebook. But driverless cars are another matter entirely.
I don't think income solely determines health. I think lots of other things determine health.
You accumulate emotional wisdom as you get older. You know, when you're 25, you go on blind dates with people that, when you're 50, you know to stay away from.
I didn't care for school much - it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the 'tawse' was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid - but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the 'dux,' as the best pupil was called.
I don't think Brexit is going to help people in Britain.
You can find episodes like the flu epidemic or war times when mortality rates go up, but sustained increases in mortality for any major group in any society are really quite rare. It's an indication that something is very wrong.
When citizens believe that the elite care more about those across the ocean than those across the train tracks, insurance has broken down, we divide into factions, and those who are left behind become angry and disillusioned with a politics that no longer serves them.
A lot of people in America and Europe feel that their governments are not representing them very much.
I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.
The call to rein in globalization reflects a belief that it has eliminated jobs in the West, sending them East and South. But the biggest threat to traditional jobs is not Chinese or Mexican; it is a robot.
My work shows how important it is that independent researchers should have access to data so that government statistics can be checked and so that the democratic debate within India can be informed by the different interpretations of different scholars.
European countries give much larger shares of aid for poverty relief than the U.S.
The best moments are when, together with... you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don't really understand. Even if it doesn't completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.
I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.
Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.
Inequality is partly a marker of success.
Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine.
A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see. If it doesn't work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.
Despite broad public support, raising the minimum wage is always difficult owing to the disproportionate influence that wealthy firms and donors have in Congress.
I believe, as do most people, that we have an obligation to assist the truly destitute.
Globalization obviously has the potential to be good. That doesn't mean it's good for everybody. There's a very large number of people in India and China who benefited directly from globalization, but it doesn't mean everybody in America benefits from globalization.
People on left have to better understand what are the benefits of inequality, and people on right have to understand better what the dangers are... It has to become properly hardwired into the American democratic debate in a way that it hasn't really been.
Businesses have moved from doing business to doing lobbying, and I think that's a very bad thing.
Success breeds inequality, and you don't want to choke off success.
The school in the Yorkshire mining village in which my father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s allowed only a few children to go to high school, and my father was not one of them. He spent much of his time as a young man repairing this deprivation, mostly at night school.
I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.
There is much that remains mysterious about why some countries grow rapidly and some grow slowly.
You can certainly draw a picture of 2016 which makes it look like the 1930s, which, of course, is what everyone is doing.
I'm very keen that we have this debate about the good parts of inequality and the bad parts of inequality. It's not a one-sided thing.
In the high-income English-speaking world, the elderly get treated very well indeed.
Parents tend to value their lives more highly than people without kids, but they're different in lots of ways: They're richer. They're better educated. They're healthier.
International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing, and our planet habitable.
Inequality is not so much a cause of economic, political, and social processes as a consequence. Some of these processes are good, some are bad, and some are very bad indeed.
If someone thinks of something, some new innovation that benefits us all, and the market works properly, they get richly rewarded for that, and that's just terrific, and that creates inequality.
A lot of our sources for income-inequality measures come from household surveys in which people report how much they earned in the last year, how much income they have, and so on. Those are not as well funded as they should be. We need to have those numbers.
Aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords and, sometimes, extending the war.
Globalization and technical change are the guarantee of our future prosperity. And reversing on that will not only make things worse, but it will make things worse for a very large number of people around the world who have benefitted - people in China and India who have been dragged out of the most awful poverty.
I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statistical or epistemic superiority.
