Branko Milanovic (@brankomilan) is a development and inequality expert at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study, where he works with @JanetGornick  and @paulkrugman . He was formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department working on global estimates of income inequality, published most recently in Global inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. The book (in its German translation) received the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016.

He is perhaps most famous for the "elephant chart" which shows how the incomes of the world’s poor and the richest people have grown sharply over time, but also identifies a group caught in the middle where incomes stagnated.

And of course he blogs at http://glineq.blogspot.com.au/

The link is to his most recent blog post, where he argues that the period of reduced income and wealth inequality in rich countries, roughly from the end of the Second World War to the early 1980s (or more abbreviated to the French as les trentes glorieuses) , relied on four pillars: strong trade unions, mass education, high taxes, and large government transfers.

He argues that none of these factors are as effective going forwards. "The decline of trade union density, present in all rich countries and especially strong in the private sector, is not the product of more inimical government policies only. ... The underlying organization of labor changed."

He argues that "high taxation of current income and high social transfers were crucial to reduce income inequality. But their further increases are politically difficult".  To some extent this is the case - but do we have to increase spending or organize it better?

He  argues that "we cannot expect small increases in the average education levels to provide the equalizing effect on wages that the mass education once did".

Personally I think that there is a long way to go to improve education outcomes.