Alyssa Battistoni in The Nation:
The economist Branko Milanovic has been a central participant in the debates of this emerging field, as well as one of its most idiosyncratic contributors. Born in Belgrade when it was part of Yugoslavia, Milanovic wrote his dissertation on income inequality in his home country long before it was a fashionable topic. He went on to research income inequality as an economist at the World Bank for nearly two decades before taking up a string of academic appointments; he currently teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. But he is not your typical World Bank economist: Milanovic knows his Marx and, though not a Marxist himself, has long insisted on the value of class analysis and historical perspectives to economics, while also dabbling in political-philosophy debates about distributive justice. His experience of life under actually existing socialism, meanwhile, gave him critical distance from the end-of-history narratives that were trumpeted in much of the West after the fall of the USSR—as well as from the end-of-the-end-of-history hand-wringing that has proliferated since 2016. The discourse, then, seems to be catching up to where Milanovic has been all along.
More here.