Wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence.

The U.S. is the country that invented progressive taxation of income and of inherited wealth in the 1910s and 20s.

Economists have put themselves in a position where what they are doing is supposed to be impossible to understand for outsiders, so they dont even talk - sometimes not even with their girlfriend or boyfriend or friends - about what they are doing.

For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

What was the good of industrial development, what was the good of all the technological innovations, toil, and population movements if, after half a century of industrial growth, the condition of the masses was still just as miserable as before, and all lawmakers could do was prohibit factory labor by children under the age of eight?

Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.

Indeed, the distribution of wealth is too important an issue to be left to economists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers.