Serbian-American economist, for many years the lead economist in the World Bank's research department, now a presidential professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and a senior scholar at its Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality; with Piketty, the most important living empirical economist of inequality. Where Piketty made the politics of inequality within national economies legible again, Milanović's central contribution has been to shift the analytical unit from the nation to the world and to ask what the distribution of income looks like when every person on earth is counted in a single distribution.
That analytical move produced, in 2013 with Christoph Lakner, the "elephant curve" — the single most reproduced chart in the globalization debate. It plots global income growth from 1988 to 2008 by percentile of the world income distribution and shows an elephant-shaped result: enormous gains for the Asian emerging middle class (the elephant's back), near-zero gains for the Western working and middle classes (the dip before the trunk), and enormous gains for the global top 1% (the raised trunk). The chart reframed the political economy of globalization — the Western populist revolts of the mid-2010s are largely a reaction to the dip — and made Milanović a public figure.
His major books extend the argument. Global Inequality (2016) is the canonical statement: a history and framework for thinking about inequality at the global rather than national scale. Capitalism, Alone (2019) offers a typology for the world after 1989: "liberal meritocratic capitalism" (the West) and "political capitalism" (China and its imitators) as two rival species of capitalism, both internally unequal, neither with a serious challenger. Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (2023) — his most recent — reads six economists (Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto, Kuznets) as theorists of income distribution. It pairs naturally with Williams's The Greatest of All Plagues and McMahon's Equality: three recent books triangulating the history of inequality thought from, respectively, political theory, intellectual history, and economics.