A Ph.D. economics student named Garrett M. Petersen interviewed me last week about inequality. He has done a series of interviews with economists on various topics and Garrett comes prepared. His questions and the thoughtfulness behind them are head and shoulders above what I normally get when questioned on talk radio. Garrett is a student at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Here’s the interview. It goes about 43 minutes.

Some highlights:
1:35: How far do Kindle readers get in reading Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century?
2:54: Obama’s passion
4:00 to 9:30: Relationships between income inequality, wealth inequality, and political inequality
9:40 to 12:00: My response to Stiglitz’s claim that much of the wealth at the high end is due to political power
12:30: How people throughout the distribution have seen their real income and wealth increase in the last few decades
13:30: Alan Reynolds’s point about the cutoff for the top 1 percent
14:25: Michael Boskin’s point about inflation over-adjustment
15:30: The implications of households splitting
17:30: Are we richer than Rockefeller?
18:40: Taxing people in the 1% more heavily to give to people below that
20:40: Chainsaw millionaire vs. Congressional privilege seeker
23:38: Piketty is non-plussed by a question from someone in an American audience
24:20: Piketty never says why we should care about inequality even though he thinks it should be the central question in economics
26:18: Do low-income people care about inequality or about low income?
30:18: Rognlie’s talk at Brookings
31:10: Garrett and I differ (I think) about wealth in housing
33:40: Global inequality is decreasing
35:30: What should people be thinking about, if not inequality
39:20: Peter Jaworski’s story about his business ethics class

BTW, Garrett does great notes at the bottom of the web page.