London Should Be Less Embarrassed About Its Wealth, Says Mayor Boris Johnson

America’s “lack of embarrassment about accumulating simply titanic sums of money” gives it a competitive advantage over the U.K., says London Mayor Boris Johnson. Speaking at The Atlantic’s CityLab 2015 summit in London Monday, Mayor Johnson bemoaned British reserve and asserted that wealth inequality was not in itself a problem for London.

“There’s a problem in the British psyche still about that, and a willingness to fire pellets and projectiles at people… There is a question about growing inequality of wealth. If you look at the multiple of earnings in London between the FTSE 100 chief executives and the average pay of their employees, it has greatly increased in the last 40 years, there’s no question about it. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, as long as those guys pay their taxes, pay their people properly—and that there’s opportunity. But there’s got to be opportunity.”