This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

I guess by way of background I've just kind of self-trained in economics, never had any college

courses, but I've taken all the teaching company courses in economics and I've been reading economics

books for decades. Not that I'm that interested in it, but I really think it's probably one of the most important subjects to understand how the world really works.

And I don't remember seeing the subject of income inequality for all these decades until the meltdown really tell like

08-09 when all of a sudden it became an interest of subjects to everyone

topic of interest to everyone including economists so is is that what kind of triggered

you're thinking about maybe addressing

this what has become an important topic

from your more specific research?

That's true.

I'd long been interested in issues of income and wealth inequality, but in past societies.

And it was only really about, as you say, 10 years ago when I encountered especially Pickett's work before his big book came out his early articles and Emmanuel Zayais's work, his collaborators,

that I got the idea well maybe there is a template, there's a model here that can be applied to

history more generally.

And pick it look at 200 years,

which for an economist, that's a really long period of time, right?

But I'm used to working on material that comes from several thousand years ago.

And so I thought, well well maybe it is possible to if you

serve at a full run of human history to find some patterns that repeat themselves over time and

that that hunch that intuition turned out to be true.

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