I don't think there is any serious evidence that we need to be paying people more than 100 times the average wage in order to get high-performing managers.

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.

Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see absolutely everything and its opposite.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

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

Our modern democratic ideal is based on the hope that inequalities will be based on merit more than inheritance or luck.

The democratic ideal has always been related to a moderate level of inequality. I think one big reason why electoral democracy flourished in 19th century America better than 19th century Europe is because you had more equal distribution of wealth in America.