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The French economist Thomas Piketty is arguably the world\u2019s greatest chronicler of economic inequality. For decades now, he has collected huge data sets documenting the share of income and wealth that has flowed to the top 1 percent. And the culmination of much of that work, his 2013 book \u201cCapital in the Twenty-First Century,\u201d quickly became one of the most widely read and cited economic texts in recent history.\n\nPiketty\u2019s new book, \u201cA Brief History of Equality,\u201d is perhaps his most optimistic work. In it, he chronicles the immense social progress that the U.S. and Europe have achieved over the past few centuries in the form of rising educational attainment, life expectancy and incomes. Of course, those societies still contain huge inequalities of wealth. But in Piketty\u2019s view, this outcome isn\u2019t an inevitability; it\u2019s the product of policy choices that we collectively make \u2014 and could choose to make differently. And to that end, Piketty proposes a truly radical policy agenda \u2014 a universal minimum inheritance of around $150,000 per person, worker control over the boards of corporations and \u201cconfiscatory\u201d levels of wealth and income taxation \u2014 that he calls \u201cparticipatory socialism.\u201d\n\nSo this conversation isn\u2019t just about the current state of inequality; it\u2019s about the kind of policies \u2014 and politics \u2014 it would take to solve that inequality. We discuss why wealth is a far more accurate indicator of social power than income, the quality of the historical data that Piketty\u2019s work relies on, why Piketty believes the welfare state \u2014 not capitalism itself \u2014 is the most important driver of human progress, why representative democracy hasn\u2019t led to more economic redistribution, whether equality is really the best metric to measure human progress in the first place, how Piketty would pay for his universal inheritance proposal, whether the levels of taxation he is proposing would stifle innovation and wreck the economy, why he believes it would be better for societies \u2014 and economic productivity \u2014 for workers to have a much larger say in how companies are governed, how Piketty thinks about the prospect of inflation and more.\n\nMentioned:\n\nThe Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel\n\n\u201cAnne Applebaum on What Liberals Misunderstand About Authoritarianism\u201d by The Ezra Klein Show\n\nBook Recommendations:\n\nThe Great Demarcation by Rafe Blaufarb\n\nThe Emergence of Globalism by Or Rosenboim\n\nThe Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt\n\nWe're hiring a researcher! You can apply here or by visiting nytimes.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/News\n\nThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.\n\nYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.\n\n\u201cThe Ezra Klein Show\u201d is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rog\xe9 Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.