Introduction

Economic inequality has gone mainstream. The list of critics of the increasing disparities in wealth and income in many countries around the globe is long; it reads like a Who’s Who in politics, business and civil society. Among those who have voiced concerns are Nobel Prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller and Joseph Stiglitz; business magnates such as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates; religious leaders, for example the Archbishop of Canterbury, Desmond Tutu and Pope Francis; and a significant number of political heavyweights, among them Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Dilma Rousseff, Xi Jinping and Jacob Zuma. Furthermore, international institutions like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2015) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Ostry et al., 2014) as well as the rating agency Standard & Poor’s (2014) have recently published studies critical of rising economic inequality, while Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) has been a huge success among book-buyers and has received broad coverage in the news media (cf. Kaufmann and Stützle, 2015: 17ff.).