The Serbian-American economist Branko Milanovic is one of the world’s foremost scholars of global inequality and the author of numerous important studies on income distribution. A former chief economist at the World Bank, Milanovic has since dedicated himself to the study of inequality from a global perspective, measuring both inequality within countries and among them.

Milanovic’s work has been an instrumental guide to understanding some of the main features of contemporary capitalism. These include a rise in inequality in the West over the last forty years, while at the same time, global inequality has been in decline — thanks in no small part to the rise of the middle classes in China and India; and the different shapes that capitalism has gone through since its origins, delving into its more recent transformations in his latest book. He has also written extensively on the emergence of a new ruling class in the West, one that combines incomes coming both from capital and wages.

Although Milanovic sometimes seems to hint that this picture of contemporary capitalism is anathema to Marx’s nineteenth-century understanding of class divisions, his latest book Capitalism, Alone shows him to be perfectly conversant in Marxist analysis and, as its title suggests, attempts to wrestle with the specificity of capitalism as a historical system.