Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. Did the post-1945

economic supremacy of the developed Western world led by the United States usher in a sense of

complacency about the efficiency and sustainability of free market capitalism? My guest today is the Nobel Prize winning economist,

Professor Angus Deaton, who launched a mammoth review into inequality earlier this year in the UK.

It's his contention that democratic capitalism is facing a real threat. But is a reboot enough, or could it be that only a revolution

will dismantle systemic economic injustice? Angus Deaton joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Let me begin with some of your own words. Democratic capitalism, you write, is under threat.

Not only in the US, where the storm clouds are darkest

but in much of the rich world can you characterize explain this threat to me yeah well i think that

it's not serving everyone and that a system that doesn't spread its riches broadly is under threat from those who get left behind,

who eventually get upset.

Don't believe the system is justified and will push back against it in many different ways.

But capitalism has been around a long time now. Not so long ago we had the US economist

Dieter McClosky on the programme and she is writing this sort of epic study of what she calls

the bourgeois era sort of 300 years of capitalism. And she points out that over those 300 years

we can look at the extraordinary boost the system has given to prosperity

at every level of society. So what you're describing right now is surely a blip, nothing more.

Well it's a pretty big blip, but I hope it is a blip. So I agree with Deirdre about the long run.

I think she's a little over-optimistic about what's happening right now.

And also not even the greatest defenders of capitalism believe that the progress has been upward and smooth for 300 years.

You know, the history of the 20th century is not one of smooth progress.

I mean, look at the horrors that happened in the 20th century.

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