My guest for this episode is Andrew Walter. Andrew and I were the first TRIUM co-Academic Directors for the London School of Economics and he has taught political economy for TRIUM every year since its start. He is super smart, very wise and a great friend of TRIUM and myself.

He is currently Professor of International Relations in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Melbourne. He was formally a Reader in International Relations at the LSE and a Fellow and University lecturer at Oxford University. Prior to joining academia, he worked for JP Morgan’s investment banking division.

In this episode we discuss his award winning newest book (co-authored with Jefferey Chwieroth) entitled, The Wealth Effect. The book documents the massive rise in both the wealth of the middle classes, how that wealth has become highly leveraged and explores the political implications of this new cleavage in society – those with wealth and those without. Specifically we discuss what happens in democracies when the middle class has highly leveraged housing assets and pensions tied to stock market performance, while at the same time there is greater and greater demand to privately fund health care, education and elder care? A quick spoiler – the consequences are not pretty.