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If the statistics can be believed, over the last 30 years the gap between rich and poor in the West has grown as cavernous as it was in the Nineteenth Century.

Income and wealth inequality – seen as almost a good thing back in the 1980s – now raises alarm across the industrialised world.

In the US, for example, the richest 1% of the population is estimated to own more than 40% of the country's wealth. And it is a similar picture across the planet.

But who are the 1%? How have they made their wealth? And why have the rest of us seemingly been left behind?

Robert Peston speaks to leading policymakers and opinion shapers as he charts the new consensus that inequality is the biggest economic challenge we face.

(Photo: Occupy movement protestors. Credit: Monika Graff/Getty Images)