Branko Milanovic

Income inequality, politics, history, soccer
Research prof, Graduate Center CUNY; Visiting prof III, LSE
Author of "The Great Global Transformation".

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

@AaronBastani And they won against Italy 1-0.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

@BenjaminFogel It was great & anti-African commentators were writing for months how Africa cannot organize it.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I am inured to the stories of the World Cups that collapse.
South Africa was supposed to be a disaster. It was excellent.
Russia was supposed to be awful. It was great (I was there.)
Qatar was supposed not to have ever happened. It was very good.
US World Cup would be good too.
And if it is not good. it will not be the first political World Cup. Mussolini ran the show in 1934, incl. in the extra-time of the final. Videla produced the World Cup win in 1978.
Football is used to politics, dictators and scandals. It can handle it.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

"Stalingrad, knowing my fate is to be with you
Woah, woah, woah, woah, Stalingrad, finally facing my Stalingrad."

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I was listening (loudly) to Abba and like many, many years ago, I thought:
Why is Waterloo a synonym for defeat and not for victory?
And why did they make a song about Waterloo and not Stalingrad?
Like instead:
"Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you
Woah, woah, woah, woah, Waterloo, finally facing my Waterloo"
they could sing:
"Stalingrad, knowing my fate is to be with you
Woah, woah, woah, woah, Stalingrad, finally facing my Stalingrad."

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I was listening (loudly) to Abba and like many, many years ago, I thought:
Why is Waterloo a synonym for defeat and not for victory?
And why did they make a song about Waterloo and not Stalingrad?
Like instead:
"Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you
Woah, woah, woah, woah, Waterloo, finally facing my Waterloo"
they could sing:
"Stalingrad, knowing my fate is to be with you
Woah, woah, woah, woah, Stalingrad, finally facing my Stalingrad."

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Social media are the greatest step in the democratization of information and spread of knowledge to the people. Ever. They are what Lenin called for: citizen-journalists.
Discuss.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Abramovich and Murinho back in the news together-again.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I spoke of it very briefly at my book promotion yesterday in Paris--I think it is an important if somewhat speculative point. The Sinification of Marxism may, for the first time in history, create a unified Euro-Asian ideology that would bring together ancient Greek and ancient Chinese influences. Plato & Confucius through Marx.
The ideological implications of China’s economic success
Sinified Marxism and its future
https://t.co/igjcBJIwvf

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

@nikstankovic_ @v_rekovic Srbija nikada ne bi prosla referendum u Francuskoj, Holandiji niti Svedskoj. Niti u Finskoj.

[Yasha Levine @yashalevine]

Me and @EvgeniaKovda are gonna be doing weekly screenings late 80s/early 90s Russian films about Soviet collapse all through July in Brooklyn.
Basically we'll be looking at superpower collapse through cinema — a topic that has a bit of relevance here in America.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

I always thought that it was an inheritance of various social revolutions in France (and that may be coming to an end because of generational replacement). Parisian "service workers" were always different from others. In other cities they were either temporarily employed in such professions & generally *professionally* nice to you, or unnecessarily obsequious. But in Paris they always seemed to me somewhat rude-not because they are rude people--but because they feel equal & want to show it. So I enjoyed they apparent rudeness.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Among the books that influenced me a lot and that I cite in "The Great Global Transformation", but perhaps they are not sufficiently noticed are:
@gilbertachcar "The New Cold War"
and
Clinton Fernandes's "Subimperial power".
Both excellent--both breaths of fresh air among the miasma of "democracy vs autocracy" tropes.

[Gilbert Achcar / جلبير الأشقر @gilbertachcar]

طبيعة الاحتلال الراهن في غزة ولبنان
أي إيمان بأن إسرائيل سوف تنسحب من غزة ومن الجنوب اللبناني بالتي هي أحسن، إنما هو وهمٌ خطير
https://t.co/zS9htubSpi

[Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins @daniel_dsj2110]

Anton Jäger in the NYT: “Against the triumphalist sensibility of the 1990s, Mr. van Middelaar cautioned Europeans against all-encompassing theories that declared history and politics over. Instead of Hegel, he urged them to look to Machiavelli.”

https://t.co/arus5cLgwZ

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

The Root of the Ukrainian Conflict Or Did Lenin Really Create Ukraine?
https://t.co/0SrZV5eTOX

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

A taxi driver says to me tonight:
Murinho is indestructible.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

"Je suis en train d'avoir un passionnant interview".
Only Dali...

[Aleksandar Matković @salematkovic]

Dali's interesting interview for a Yugoslav television, in which he states that he praises Tito.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

"So, on the question of the Arab conquests changing Mediterranean trade flows, I would broadly agree with Pirenne."
https://t.co/Ausvz8D8aJ

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

What is the bottom line?
The period when mostly Chinese growth had driven global inequality down has come to an end. Not because Chinese growth is now less, but because China has become too rich. Whether global inequality will go down, or, as I am afraid, up in this century will crucially depend on whether India and populous African countries can accelerate their rate of growth.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

The mother of all inequality disputes. (All data are in PPPs and on per capita basis; all measures are in Ginis.)
Unweighted international inequality (aka Concept 1 inequality) is inequality of all countries' GDPs per capita (as simple as that). It has been going down, but slowly, over the past 30 years, that is, countries are more or less income converging.
Population-weighted inequality (aka Concept 2 inequality) is the same as Concept 1 ineq but now each country enters the calculation with its total population. Obviously China, India etc. now count for a lot. That inequality went sharply down in the past 40 years, but has now stalled. This is an important fact b/c Concept 2 inequality is the most important factor in determining what happens to inequality among all 8+ billion people in the world.

[Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan]

Finally, the most important: dots showing global inequality (aka Concept 3 inequality) include (almost) all the world population that enter into calculations with their individual incomes as estimated from household surveys. That inequality has also gone down starting from around the turn of the century, but has now stopped decreasing, and in the last available year (2023) it even went slightly up.

(Concept 3 ineq is not available annually b/c many countries do not produce survey data every year. So, we have to use a benchmark year, approximately every five years. No data here use approximations, extrapolation, guesses and the like. They are all based on documented national and IMF/World Bank data.)