The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation, at the expense of historical research and collaboration with the other social sciences.

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?

It's important to realize that innovation and growth in itself are not sufficient to moderate inequality of wealth.

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

We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information.

It's not Utopian to believe that we can create a global registry of financial assets so we know who owns what in different countries.

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