Stone Center Affiliated Scholar Daniel Waldenström argues in his new book, Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West, that Western society — particularly the middle class — is not only wealthier now than a century ago, but that wealth inequality has declined. Stone Center Senior Scholar Salvatore Morelli, the director of the GC Wealth Project, joins him in a discussion of the positive and negative aspects of wealth accumulation, what Waldenström calls the “old narrative” of the wealth distribution over the last 130 years, and whether to include public pensions in wealth measurements.
Morelli is also an associate professor in public economics in the Law Department at the Roma Tre University, and Waldenström is a professor of economics at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics in Stockholm. This conversation was recorded in September.