“This is not a comfortable situation for anyone, including those who are on top of the social heap at any given time. Do the wealthy and powerful … like having to avert their eyes from the homeless and hungry people they pass on the street? Do they enjoy using the tools of the state — including its police powers and other forms of coercion — to suppress the inevitable protests mounted by those on the bottom? Do they really want their own children and grandchildren to inherit this kind of world?”

I sat down with Yunus last week to discuss his new book.

David Bornstein: This is both a solutions book and a warning call. What is the danger?

Muhammad Yunus: Wealth concentration. In the book, I cite an Oxfam report that says that eight people own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the world. Recently, I saw a newspaper report that said now it’s just five people. There are two things to be concerned about: the concentration of wealth and the increasing speed of this concentration. We didn’t notice it when 5,000 people or 50,000 people owned more wealth than the bottom half of the world. Now it’s five people. In a year or two it will be just one person. This is the speed at which it is happening.

The capitalist system is a machine which sucks up wealth from the bottom to send it to the top. It’s not the fault of individuals at the top. They follow what the system asks them to do: chase money. But in the process, wealth at the top grows like a giant mushroom owned by fewer and fewer people — for the simple reason that the more they have, the more they get. Wealth is a magnet. If you have a little magnet, you attract a little wealth. If you have a big magnet, you attract more. And this wealth mushroom is worse than the atomic mushroom cloud. It will destroy our politics, it will destroy our society, it will destroy our economy — because concentration of wealth goes with concentration of power. This will generate tremendous anger at the bottom, and that anger will disrupt everything. Brexit is the outcome of this anger. Same with the recent U.S. election. Now see the German election. This mushroom is a ticking time bomb. We need to spend many sleepless nights over it.

D.B.: You say that this problem lies at the root of capitalist theory.

M.Y.: The capitalist system is based on a fundamental flaw, on misinterpretation of human beings. In capitalist theory, it is assumed that man is entirely driven by self-interest. That’s definitely not the description of a real human being. Human beings are selfish, and at the same time they are equally selfless, if not more. They want to help others. Adam Smith wrote this in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” He was a professor of philosophy. He was interested in morality. Then he wrote a completely different book that talked about self-interest and the “invisible hand.” The first book was forgotten. He never integrated the two books.