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LISTEN: Thomas Piketty spells out why inequality exploded in the ’80s

French economist Thomas Piketty has bad news for admirers of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: they screwed everything up! Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, has ignited a world wide debate about why capitalism is broken, and it’s making Kevin O’Leary lose his cool. Piketty sifts through historical data and shows that inequality has been steadily […]

French economist Thomas Piketty has bad news for admirers of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: they screwed everything up!

Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty First Century, has ignited a world wide debate about why capitalism is broken, and it’s making Kevin O’Leary lose his cool.

Piketty sifts through historical data and shows that inequality has been steadily increasing and increasing over time. And this isn’t simply a freak accident of capitalism, Piketty says — it’s one of capitalism’s defining features.

Listen to this clip from CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition where Piketty attributes the explosion in inequality in the late 20th century to the damaging neoliberal economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the corresponding decline of labour unions and the progressive tax system to counter-balance the unequal effects of capitalism:

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