Kamer Daron Acemoğlu the 44 year old Turkish-American Professor of Economics at MIT has argued in an interview published by The Browser that it is important that we understand how and why leading western nations have over the past 30 years become far less equal. Acemoğlu states, “A lot of things don’t change radically, but inequality has… it’s an important topic and there is no reason for it to be taboo… if you want to understand the top inequality, why the top 0.1% – even more than what the 1% Occupy Wall Streeters are talking about – have been earning such huge amounts, then really you have to think about the social policy aspects of it and the politics of it. There is perhaps some sort of failure in how our system is working… if you look from the 1950s up to the end of the 1970s, the share of total national income in the US earned by the richest 1% was about 10%. If you look at the 2000s, it’s well over 20%…”

 

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