Steven Bartlett

So, I don't want to overgeneralize.

But certainly in the second half of the 20th century, the democracies since the Second World War have tended towards equality, including in the United States.

And at their most successful and prosperous moments, there was much less wealth inequality than there is now.

And the countries we were talking about earlier, the happy countries—

Those are relatively equal countries.

And those are countries with big welfare states and a lot of redistribution of wealth.

And those are countries where people feel invested in the system, partly because they don't feel completely outclassed by a group of oligarchs.

If you look at the United States in the 1950s, that was a period of also huge social mobility when lower middle class, middle class people began to get wealthier.

And there's this enormous wave of prosperity.

And that's a period when everybody is becoming wealthier.

And that was also a period when you have the very successful American democracy.

You have the civil rights movement.

You have democracy beginning to spread to new populations or to people who'd been excluded before.

So you have a connection between equality and democracy, even wealth equality.

And one of the things that gives—

critics of the United States' most anxiety now is precisely what you just said.

You know, the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any one politician and who even have the power to organize information space.

How long will that group of people want to live in a democracy where everybody gets a vote and wealth is supposed to be distributed more evenly?

There are some members of that community who have become illiberal or anti-democratic for exactly that reason.

We are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote.