PERSON
Branko Milanovic
The Serbian-American economist whose elephant curve made the distributional consequences of globalization undeniable—and whose framework of historical inequality cycles is the clearest available instrument for measuring who will capture the gains of the AI transition.
Branko Milanovic spent four decades assembling the first comprehensive picture of global inequality across countries, classes, and centuries—and his core finding is one of the most consistently ignored truths in the history of technology: aggregate gains from every technological revolution tell you almost nothing about who actually benefits. The GDP rises; the distribution curve reveals who eats and who watches. His
elephant curve—the 1988–2008 global income chart whose silhouette named itself—made this undeniable for globalization, revealing the deep valley of stagnation carved into the developed world’s lower-middle and middle classes while capital and the global rich soared. His framework of
Kuznets waves—recurring cycles in which technological transitions first concentrate then eventually broaden prosperity—supplies the historical depth to understand the current AI transition as one episode in a pattern that has recurred in recognizably similar form since the spinning jenny. And his concept of
homoploutia—the structural condition in which the same individuals are simultaneously rich in both capital and