What is different between national inequality and global inequality is you have another element there that is sometimes forgotten: what matters for global inequality is relative growth rates between poor and rich countries.

I was at the World Bank and a commission reviewed our work on inequality for the U.S. Congress or somebody, and the head of the commission said to us: You are spending taxpayer money to study issues like inequality? Which goes directly against capitalism and growth. That was the perception, that it should not be studied.

If we knew what type of jobs would exist in 20 years, we would be quite rich. But we just cannot visualize it.

In the U.S. when people like me started writing things about inequality, the economic journals had no classification for inequality. I couldn't find where to submit my inequality papers because there was no such topic. There was welfare, there was health issues, there was trade obviously. Finance had hundreds of sub groups.

Even if parties associated with right wing populism don't win, they push other parties, the centrist parties, towards their position. So they do have an influence even if they're not in power.

While you can say that the problem of the middle class in the rich countries is too much globalization, the problem of the people who are very poor is really that they are not included in globalization. For them, the success of their own countries at becoming part of this international division of labor would be good news.