“Thirty years ago, the Anglo-American capitalist system was the apartment block everyone in the world admired,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild told a gathering of business and political influentials gathered on the 28th floor of Bloomberg LP’s Lexington Avenue office tower on Thursday morning.

“Now, that apartment block has really nice apartments up on top. In the middle, they’re kind of cramped and dowdy, and on the lower floors, they’re underwater. But the worst part of it is—the elevator’s broken.”

The metaphor wasn’t hers (she’d borrowed it from Harvard economist Larry Katz), but the morning was. Wearing a slim-fitting sleeveless dress and lots of gold, Ms. de Rothschild was welcoming guests to the U.S. launch of something called the Henry Jackson Initiative for Inclusive Capitalism. It was less a think tank than a movement, less a movement than a platform for a double-edged idea: That everyone should benefit from gains made by the capitalist system, and that it’s good for capitalists when everybody does. Read More