CONTENTS THE RISING TIDE The gulf between rich and poor worldwide is growing ever wider, which is why LSE launched the International Inequalities Institute earlier this year. Co-director Mike Savage sat down with renowned economist Thomas Piketty to get his take on what has become one of the key issues of our time. R ising inequalities, both within and between nations, have become one of the defining issues of the early 21st century, with numerous actors from Oxfam to the International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum highlighting a concern about the growing gulf between the richest and poorest in society. The International Inequalities Institute (III) has been created to explore why inequalities are escalating across the world and to develop critical tools to address these challenges. The III was delighted to announce the appointment of celebrated economist Thomas Piketty as Centennial Professor earlier this year. His recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, has sold more copies than any other work of social science in recent decades and has acted as a catalyst for further research and debate on this key theme. In July 2015, I visited Paris to talk to Professor Piketty about his work. A doctoral student in the Economics Department between 1991 and 1993, he made it clear to me that his time at LSE was formative for him: “LSE for me was great. What attracted me to the III was, firstly, my strong attachment to LSE, but also the intense interdisciplinary nature of the Institute. I really believe that to do good work on inequality we need an interdisciplinary approach and I think LSE is probably one of the best places in the world to do that.” Thomas Piketty speaking at the launch of the LSE International Inequalities Institute in May 2015 Mike Savage: Your book has generated lots of debate over the last year and a half… Thomas Piketty: What I really tried to do is develop a multi-dimensional approach to capital ownership and wealth – that’s why the book is so long! I show that the history of real-estate assets is different from the history of agricultural land, which is different from public debt, from the history of slave capital, from foreign investment… And all these different forms of assets involve specific compromise, specific institutional and legal forces, specific bargaining between owners and workers. To me that’s absolutely central to understand what’s going on, and is a big part of what’s happening in many countries at the moment. 14 I LSE Connect I Winter 2015 I MS: Inequality is such a huge topic. What are the main issues you’d like to tackle in the next few years? TP: One impact of the book was that it created stronger pressure on the governments in Brazil, Korea, Mexico, etc to answer why they weren’t in the database, so it’s now easier to access some of the historical and fiscal data in a number of emerging countries. So one important area for the future is extending the database. MS: So it’s keeping the same models and approaches but extending the range? TP: You know, I’m not really a model-driven person. I think the history of inequality is always country-specific. Each country is