Income inequality in the United States is recognized as a worsening significant issue.  At a recent meeting of the Columbia University Alumni Association (held in the austere richness of Boston’s Algonquin Club), Economics Professor Sunil Gulati, and politically liberal chief investment officer of Sankaty Advisors Jonathan Lavine, speculated about how to address it. The bad news is that suggestions were short on specifics and avoided any discussion of  economic measures which might promptly mitigate at least the trend if the not the status quo.  Emphasis on needs-blind university education for talented students and mention of reforming immigration policies to keep US-educated foreign graduates in the United States (rather than forcing them to go home and take their expertise and entrepreneurial drive with them) are both fine ideas, but are long-term structural elements unlikely to have short-term results and unlikely to create public assurance that the basic issue is being addressed directly. Of course a specific discussion of governmental involvement, by regulation or tax policy, would be highly volatile.  Congress, in addressing the issue, charged the SEC with forcing disclosure of executive salaries, through more robust discussion of compensation and advisory “say on pay” votes by shareholders, and did not either attack income disparity through tax policy (beyond the modest existing provisions of IRC section 162[m] which limit CEO comp deductibility in certain instances) or through admittedly un-American absolute caps on earnings or through robust national hourly wage minimums. It is likely too much to ask major investors in business, obligated to their own stake-holders to produce robust returns, to make fostering of income equality a checklist item when deploying capital, and no one raised that issue with the panel (Lavine runs Sankety which is an investment affiliate of Bain), but if money talks then one quick way force the issue is to build the goal of income equality into the criteria for investment.  Not a likely development….