Dear Commons Community,

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and French economist Thomas Piketty sat down together with The Huffington Post for a nearly hour-long interview being broadcast on HuffPost Live for the first time Monday evening.

Warren, a Democrat, and Piketty each have authored books on inequality that have surged to the top of Amazon and The New York Times bestseller lists. Warren, a former professor whose work focused on bankruptcy, wrote A Fighting Chance, a memoir of her political rise and a plea for a playing field no longer tilted in favor of big banks, the wealthy and global corporations.

Piketty is the author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, a 700-page tome translated from French that has taken the publishing world by storm and turned the debate on inequality on its head. Piketty finds evidence that capitalism, absent aggressive tax policy, distributes income in a deeply unequal way, which compounds over time.

The wide-ranging discussion touched on  student debt, climate change, free trade, the role of labor unions and the link between inequality, political instability and war.

Tony