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Billionaire hedge fund founder Ray Dalio may not be the first person you’d think of as a crusader against capitalism.

But at the Summit conference in Los Angeles this week, he questioned the current U.S. economic system. “Capitalism is basically not working for the majority of people,” he said.

Dalio has a net worth estimated at $18 billion, according to Forbes, largely gained from building and running Bridgewater Associates, the largest and—by some metrics—most successful hedge fund in the world. His critique is all the more noteworthy, coming from one of the system’s biggest winners.

“Economics and markets are my day job,” said Dalio, who published a book in September titled A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises.

His comments come as many people in the so-called millennial generation and younger are questioning the structure of the U.S. financial system. Born in the economically buoyant late 1980s and 1990s, millennials and Generation Y have watched vast wealth accrue for those who already had it, a polarity that was only exacerbated during and after the financial crisis as inequality has widened to its worst level since 1928.

Read more: Ray Dalio’s Principles for Success

It’s reached enough of a din to inspire billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, Ken Langone, to publish a book May called I Love Capitalism! (it has 4.5 stars on Amazon), and last month the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a presentation titled “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.”

Still, critiques abound. Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn’s forthcoming book, The Myth of Capitalism, argues that the current U.S. system is so dominated by monopolies that it isn’t true capitalism. There’s also Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All, published in August, which posits that the efforts by the global elite to save the world through philanthropy serves to preserve the status quo that benefits them—and to mask their own participation in creating the crises they’re purporting to fix.

It’s showing up in politics: Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind., Vt.) rode a popular wave to be runner-up for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, and then this week democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, after her surprise upset of the Democratic incumbent in the primary.

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Dalio has spoken about the pressing problem of inequality for years—and has warned that artificial intelligence will help to worsen it.

In his speech this week, he cited a Federal Reserve survey statistic that 40% of U.S. households could not raise $400 in case of emergency without selling something.

“We might not have contact with those people, but that is a reality,” Dalio told the crowd, who paid thousands of dollars to sit on the Palace Theater’s velvet seats and hear him speak.

The current polarization—both politically and socially—is most analogous to the 1930s, he argued. “It has to be dealt with,” Dalio said, saying if he were running things, he’d declare the wealth gap and opportunity gap a “national emergency.”

Listen to a conversation between Mary Childs and Alex Eule on how the bond king Bill Gross became the world leader of stamps—and why he’s now getting out—in a recent episode of The Readback. You can sign up for the podcast in iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.

If the government “created metrics that literally judged the conditions of people, and then took responsibility for changing those metrics, there’s a lot that can be done in private-public partnerships and so on to be able to change it,” he said. “But I fear that probably will not be done by the next time we have a downturn, and I fear for what that conflict is going to be like.”

Write to Mary Childs at mary.childs@barrons.com