Everything Podcasts: The Issue of Our Time: The Asset Economy

This is part two of a three-part series of dialogues is led by Dr. Johnna Montgomerie, Professor of International Political Economy, at Kings College London.  In this virtual symposium, we’ve called on experts from the politics of inequality working group at King's College, London, and sought out our colleagues at other universities to share their ideas, research, and proposals to help explain what it means to call inequality issue of our time. We wanted to examine who was unequal, what causes inequality and why it's an urgent area of study.In this episode, the dialogue transitions from establishing shared understandings of inequality to evaluating the ascent of finance in contemporary life, specifically the role that assets and debts play in shaping the contours of who is at risk of experiencing inequality. Experts answer what is new about contemporary inequality and what has changed in the configuration of the economy itself to worsen inequality. To answer these questions, the discussion shifts from the domestic national economies to global finance and interrogates the ways in which global financial markets connect to everyday life. Authors of the book "The Asset Economy" share how income levels are just one among many significant factors like family wealth or inherited wealth plus age, race, gender and where you live that contribute to inequality.