“Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable,” Piketty writes, “depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.”

this backstory makes the following acknowledgment as plain as it deserves to be: the best way to know about a problem is to be part of it.

“The winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm.”

When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. It is saying what it believes through what it does. Cordelli argues that this right to speak for others is simply illegitimate when exercised by a powerful private citizen. “You are an individual,” she

“It seems to me that these days everyone wants to change the world by themselves,” she said. “It’s about them; it’s about what they do. But there are other people around you, and you owe it to them to support institutions that can, in the name of everyone, including in their own name, secure certain conditions for a more decent life.”

Seen through Cordelli’s lens, it is indeed strange that the people with the most to lose from social reform are so often placed on the board of it.

citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their society foreseeably and persistently allows; that they have a special duty toward those it systematically fails; and that this burden falls most heavily on those most amply rewarded by the same, ultimately arbitrary set of arrangements.

“If you have campaigned against inheritance tax, if you have directly tried to avoid paying taxes, if you supported and directly, voluntarily benefited from a system where there were low labor regulations and increased precarity,” then, she argues, “you have directly contributed to a structure that foreseeably and avoidably harmed people.” That is

Take, for instance, the view that MarketWorld has a duty, and right, to address public problems—and, indeed, to take a lead in developing private solutions to them. This, for Cordelli, was like putting the accused in charge of the court system. The question that elites refuse to ask, she said, is: “Why are there in the world so many people that you