. >> joining us this week on book tv from london is stewart landsley who is a visiting fellow with the townson center for international poverty

. >> joining us this week on book tv from london is stewart landsley who is a visiting fellow with the townson center for international poverty research. professor, what is the center? >> guest: it is an institution and after an academic named peter and it really we invented the nature of poverty research. and he was probably the cheek -- chief architect rather than the absolute concept and in fact he died unfortunately a couple of years ago and the center where he was working was sort of named after him, so it was in fact a sort of social policy institute that has now become the poverty center. >> host: you published a book called the cost of any quality three decades of the super rich and the economy. are we living in a time of economic inequality and is that important? >> guest: we are indeed the gap between the rich and the poor stands at the mere historical levels, not just in the united kingdom but even more so in the united states and across the majority of the rich world. these countries have been getting much more unequaled since the 1970's and in some countries particularly t