Facundo Alvaredo
Facundo Alvaredo is professor at the Paris School of Economics and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Co-Director of the World Inequality Database (formerly The World Top Incomes Database, which he created with colleagues in 2011) and the World Inequality Lab, Researcher of IIEP-UBA-Conicet, and senior Fellow of INET@Oxford. He obtained a PhD in Economics from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires.
He focuses his research on the fields of public economics, the inequality of income and wealth, and the economic history of capitalism. Part of his current research seeks to show that only the continuation of the living yet dormant Political Economy project, i.e. the discipline embracing capitalism and its history as subject matter, offers the keys to understand the challenges of the historical present, where the main conflict is who plans whom. This imposes a critical revision of the dichotomy between civil society and political society inherited from the Enlightenment, an illusion that lives today through the fiction of the state as the sphere of common good that should and could tame capital and foster sustainable development through properly evaluated parliament-decided public policies.