I was at the World Bank and a commission reviewed our work on inequality for the U.S. Congress or somebody, and the head of the commission said to us: "You are spending taxpayer money to study issues like inequality? Which goes directly against capitalism and growth." That was the perception, that it should not be studied.

Even if parties associated with right wing populism don't win, they push other parties, the centrist parties, towards their position. So they do have an influence even if they're not in power.

What is different between national inequality and global inequality is you have another element there that is sometimes forgotten: what matters for global inequality is relative growth rates between poor and rich countries.

When the industrial revolution happened there was the Luddistic movement, and there was a fear that machinery would replace all the labor. Whenever we had a technological revolution we had this fear. So if you look backwards, these fears were not justified, and I think they were driven by our very human inability to visualize what new jobs will be created by this new technology.

The middle class in the rich countries is where the political game is being played. They are voting in elections in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany. They are working people in the upper part of the global income distribution. They might on average be happy that the Chinese are doing well, but they are not happy that the Chinese are doing well relative to them.

People in the rich countries who have done very well, who are at the top of the income pyramid, try to steamroll over the opposition of the middle without changing anything in social programs, or any redistribution. And they take their votes for a given. They have rich people that bankroll them. And the globalization would continue, but it would continue with permanent dissatisfaction among large segments of the people.

If, for example, each of us had the same share of capital in the national total capital, then if the share of capital goes up it's not a problem, because you get as much as I do. The problem is that capital in capitalist countries is very heavily concentrated, especially financial capital. So then if the share of income from that source goes up, that actually exacerbates inequality.