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Episode 24.

A history of inequality.

The rent is too damn high.

I think we can all agree on that.

But why is the rent too damn high?

That simple question may turn out to be one of the defining questions of the 21st century.

Last year, I met a woman in San Francisco who told me that she had moved to the city in the 60s and worked as a baker, baking bread and muffins. And with the money she made from that, which she only did part-time, she could afford to live in a spacious apartment downtown, big enough to double as an art studio. She even had a car and a place to park it. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking of packing your bags, putting flowers in your hair, and moving to San Francisco to bake some muffins. But I've got news for you. With the money you make from that today, you wouldn't even be able to rent the upper bunk of a shared room in San Francisco. And apartments like the one my artist Baker friend had are now only affordable to senior-level employees at the tech giants of Silicon Valley. So unless you're baking muffins for Jack Dorsey at Twitter headquarters, you're not going to be living downtown.

Which brings us back to the defining question, why is the rent too damn high?

Why is it that the millennial generation,

despite being more educated than their parents, are much less financially secure and usually

cannot afford to live the lifestyle that their parents had? In 2013, a French economist named

Thomas Piquetti offered an answer to this question that caused a global sensation.

In his book called Capital in the 21st century, Piccadie presented data showing that

economic inequality has been continuously rising globally since World War II.

Now, wait a moment. Hasn't most of the world experienced remarkable economic growth since World War II?

Well, Pickety claims that even as most countries have experienced economic growth, they have at

the same time seen inequality rise. In other words, your country may appear to be doing spectacularly

well according to the standard metric of economic growth, even as it is transformed into a plutocracy,

where the 1% own almost everything and the rest are getting by paycheck to paycheck.

So why was inequality lower in the 50s and 60s in much of the world?

Well, here's where Pickety's book gets even more controversial.

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