Whatever a country’s level of income inequality, its level of wealth inequality is even worse. In fact, in many countries there is no correlation between the level of income inequality and wealth inequality. So if differences in income aren’t the main factor driving wealth inequality, what is?

Fabian Pfeffer is a professor of sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich where he holds the Chair for Social Inequality and Social Structures. He is the founding director of the Munich International Stone Center for Inequality Research. Before that, he was the founding director of the Center for Inequality Dynamics at the University of Michigan. In this conversation, Pfeffer and host Steven Durlauf discuss wealth inequality dynamics across nations and generations.