I’m delighted to have been awarded the 2014 Bruce Jesson prize, to work on a book on wealth inequality in New Zealand. Wealth – as opposed to income – inequality is increasingly a hot topic. I also think it’s time that we looked not just at what’s happening in deprived neighbourhoods but also at how…

Today’s Morning Report interviewed Oliver Williams from something called Wealth Insight, a consultancy, arguing that the world’s first trillionaire would be created within 50 years. Predictably, Williams tried to claim that to get that rich “you would have to invent something or create something”. But as Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century…

Thomas Piketty’s new book ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’ has been making waves overseas: it’s number one on Amazon, and has been lauded as a book that will transform how we think about society and do economics – by Paul Krugman, no less. So far, there’s not been much attention on how it will…

          This graph, compiled by Geoff Bertram from Victoria University, emphasises how the NBR Rich List’s wealth has increased dramatically since the mid-1980s. It also shows two things. First, the sharp rise in income inequality in the mid-80s to mid-90s has resulted in a large and lasting increase in wealth concentration. Even…