Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps

that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream

van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

On tonight's program, two significant interviewees, one, a Nobel Prize winner, born in America's Industrial Belt,

who was there when Martin Luther King gave his Washington,

I have a dream speech.

The other, an award-winning novelist born in Poit Noir in the Republic of the Congo.

As a child he could gorge on American films at his local cinema,

it's now become a Pentecostal church. Later, Alamabonku, Man Booker International Prize finalist

for his memoir The Lights of Poit Noir about his return to his country after an absence of 23 years.

All has changed, and his mother has died in the interval.

But first, Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner for economics in 2000,

his new book, The Great Divide, is like much of his work,

an attempt to show that there's nothing inevitable about increasing

inequality in a globalised world. It's a matter of politics, he argues, excoriating

attacks on the obscene wealth of the 1%, an essay saying Singapore does equality better than the US

in numerous ways.

You can imagine how that went down back home, as well as an anti-austerity message for Europe are amongst the topics of someone born in 1943 and raised in what some call the golden

age of American capitalism, but not Joseph Stieglitz.

I want to start if I can with a kind of big question,

which is not only as I read your book, but as I read a lot,

it's perfectly clear to me economics has triumphed over sociology.

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