A thoughtful PhD on inequality...

If you're interested in seeing beyond the politics of inequality, watch this interview with Dierdre McCloskey (HT Don Boudreaux). She's the thoughtful sort of PhD I referred to in yesterday's blog post.

Here's a snippet:

I think we need a rethink of market economies. We don't want to throw them away, they're a fantastically valuable tool for helping the poor. They're so much larger, in effect, than any redistribution we can do. Since 1800, incomes per head in places like Britain and the United States have increased by a factor of twenty or thirty. That helps poor people a lot more than a five or ten or fifteen percent redistribution. It's twenty-nine hundred percent, as against fifteen percent.