The reduction of inequality and in particular the increase in the share of total wealth going to the middle class came in the 20th century through a number of public policies,

broadly speaking, you know, the rise of social security, free education,

progressive taxation.

And so the key question is based on this historical lessons, how can we keep making progress in the future and in particular

how can we improve the share of total wealth owned by the bottom 50% which is still very very small today.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

Today I want to share some of the core findings of Chapter 3 of The Great Experiment with you.

It starts with a kind of puzzle. In India, we have often had deep forms of what Indians call

inter-communal violence, of terrible riots

that have caused the lives of many Muslims and Hindus over the course of the past decades.

But the great political scientist Asht Georgeharshvashny poses a kind of puzzle.

Why is it that the city of Allegra experienced a lot of these riots, a lot of these tragic clashes between Hindus and Muslims.

But the city of Cosicode, it's actually very similar.

That's similar size and affluence and similar demographic composition with about two-thirds of Hindus

and one-third of Muslims has not experienced those kinds of violent clashes.

What can explain this? Well, I think this question can be answered by looking at two really helpful findings in the psychology and the political science literature.

The first is about intergroup contact.

It's the fact that when people spend more time with groups against which they used to have some amount of prejudice,

they can, under the right circumstances, come to have much more mutual tolerance.

In Boston in the early 1950s, for example,

whites that lived door-to-door with African Americans

ended up having more positive views of them than

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