Lucas Chancel

World Inequality Report 2026 is the most authoritative and wide-ranging account available of global trends in inequality. Researched, compiled, and written by a team of world-leading economists, the report builds on the 2022 and 2018 editions to provide policy makers and scholars everywhere up-to-date information about an ever-broader range of countries and about forms of inequality that researchers have previously ignored or found hard to trace. Inequality has increasingly taken center stage in public debate as the wealthiest people in most parts of the world have seen their share of the economy soar relative to that of others. The resulting political and social pressures have posed harsh new challenges for governments and created a pressing demand for reliable data. The World Inequality Lab, housed at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, has answered this call by coordinating research into the latest trends in the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth on every continent. This new report not only provides up-to-date information about the history of inequality as well as inequalities across regions, climate, gender and tax, but it also offers comprehensive new analysis of privilege and unequal exchange in the global financial system and examines the impact of inequality on political behavior. World Inequality Report 2026 will be a key document for anyone concerned about one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.

A Financial Times Best Book of the YearA hardheaded book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa.Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can be compatible, but that progress requires substantial changes in public policy.Chancel begins by reviewing the problems. Human actions have put the natural world under unprecedented pressure. The poor are least to blame but suffer the most—forced to live with pollutants that the polluters themselves pay to avoid. But Chancel shows that policy pioneers worldwide are charting a way forward. Building on their success, governments and other large-scale organizations must start by doing much more simply to measure and map environmental inequalities. We need to break down the walls between traditional social policy and environmental protection—making sure, for example, that the poor benefit most from carbon taxes. And we need much better coordination between the center, where policies are set, and local authorities on the front lines of deprivation and contamination.A rare work that combines the quantitative skills of an economist with the argumentative rigor of a philosopher, Unsustainable Inequalities shows that there is still hope for solving even seemingly intractable social problems.