the first question, and only a sentence to answer the second.

Milanovic is a senior scholar with the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, but he’s lived many interesting lives. Think of him as an intellectual refugee from the former Yugoslavia at a time when Belgrade was not exactly the most career-friendly place to express an interest in the measurement of inequality; imagine, say, an opposition figure like the famous dissident Milovan Djilas who had aspirations of being a statistician.

Think of him as a World Bank apparatchik, data cruncher par excellence, not for any one country but for each and every country, for the world. And think of him as a reflective academic, deeply read in history and economics, and motivated by an abiding curiosity aboutgroup standing on the same rung of the 1988 global income ladder saw their income increase by 2008. The percentage increase in income over this period was significant for some, strikingly so for many others, but disappointing for others.

Clearly evident are the rise of a global middle class, in some important measure reflecting the great march out of poverty in China, and the equally amazing rise in the incomes of the top 1 percent globally. The winners of globalization were many people who three decades ago were dirt-poor, and though a big percentage increase in a very low-income still amounts to a rather low-income by the standards of the average person in the rich countries, it is a major movement in the right direction. But the great winners