Inequality is declining by every measurable metric in the United States.
Edit: To answer the folk naysaying with their ten second Google searches, the income inequality rate has declined between 2007 and 2019(1), helped by a strong wage recovery in the late 2010s. The share of wealth held by the top 10% peaked around 2015 and has declined steadily since. 2022 was a very bad year for equity markets and has hit wealthy households particularly hard.
These are all pretty findable and uncontroversial statistics, but unfortunately one political tribe has invested a lot of capital in the notion inequality is inexorably increasing, so there’s a lot of pundit mileage in contorting these stats.(2) Which is sad, because these stats are good news for anyone who truly cares about inequality.
(1) I’m book-ending at 2019 because pandemic era macro is weird, and will take us some years to understand.
(2) I’m not making a partisan point here - stats are stats, and both political tribes lie endlessly about them when convenient.
Economist Thomas Piketty would like to have a word. The top 1% takes more of the US national income than the entire bottom half and their share is increasing. Income growth in the bottom 20% is negative.[0] Although perhaps we have different definitions of inequality. If the rings of the ladder are pulling apart in this fashion I’m going to take that as evidence of increasing inequality.
[0] Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman (2018): _Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States_, Quarterly Journal of Economics 2, 2018, Vol. 133, S. 553-609.
> Inequality is declining by every measurable metric in the United States.
How would you explain any of these metrics? https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
Is this a direct measure of inequality? I suppose it depends but I would say yes?
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
But aside from that a more important metric than inequality is the real material conditions of regular people.
In Canada at least rents have been spiking for years on end which is directly reducing people's money on hand, and an inflation crisis is further compounding this issue this year. There's different situations in different US states, but I do not believe the situation is terribly different in many places.
Things are getting worse and worse because people have less and less money.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/01/23/china-military-sp...
At any rate, blaming the problems on inequality seems a lot like seeing everything as nail when all you have is a hammer. I'm not sure why OP's complaint that people don't care as much, or that they are loud and inconsiderate, necessarily has anything to do with inequality. The might feel like there's no chance to get ahead so I'm just going to not care and act inconsiderate. Or they might just be selfish, perhaps because we have ads constantly telling people "get the X you deserve". Or they might be selfish because that's human nature and since society rarely goes to church any more (only 31% attend weekly, 42% at least once a month [1]) they don't hear anything telling them that selfishness is "wrong". I'm sure you can think of other reasons that have nothing to do with economics or oppression.
Furthermore, I'm not sure that inequality produces not caring or inconsideration. Take the 1920s, which had higher levels of inequality than now [2]. People born in that decade are part of the "Greatest Generation", known for their self-sacrifice, not selfishness. My impression is that civic mindedness was actually a thing back then. And it's hard to tell what is representative looking back 100 years, but the buildings from that era seem to be well-built, and you see pictures of working class people in suits (I've seen one with men lounging around a seawall in suits, which you'd never see today). So I dispute that inequality necessarily produces what the OP complains about. (I also think the OP is also not seeing the unpleasant parts of the recent past.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/245491/church-attendance...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Historical-economic-ineq...
That was the greatest generation. It grew out of Marxist talking points.
Regarding the Great Depression, though, the generally accepted cause are generally seen as monetary policy failures and/or the effects of deflation [1]. Of course Marxists see the cause being inequality, but this is looking for nails for your hammer: Marxists only have one note in their song. You'd think that if inequality played a large part in causing the Great Depression, that there would be a fair number of economists--whose job it is to figure out why the economy does what it does--who would agree with that view. But they don't.
Calling the Greatest Generation as growing out of Marxists talking points is just ... well, I guess if you think that socialists, communists, unionists, collectivists, New Deal people are heroes, you might think it was a great generation, but I've never heard the term "Greatest Generation" as referring to anything of the sort.
Religion went away decades upon decades ago. It went away in my parents' generation. That is not new.
In my lifetime, the main variable that has been changing the most for the negative, rapidly getting severely and dramatically worse is the cost of living and in particular the cost of housing.
Maybe the causes of everything getting worse are just that simple.
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...
Define: life
What life exactly can people not afford anymore? The kind people had in 1900? 1950? 2000? What kind of trend are you indicating here, the last two years only or something broader? Because I don't know of a country not actively at war whose chance on a good life didn't improve over the last generation.
The material conditions of regular people are continuously getting worse as more and more of their income is stripped away by rent seeking oligopolies, mainly increasing housing costs but depending on your jurisdiction all sorts of other costs (eg. cable and mobile phone costs an issue in some places, healthcare in other places).
In the worst extremes people are simply running out of money and the amount of people at risk of homelessness and in homelessness is spiking, and people in such dire conditions are dying at a remarkable rate given the toxic drug crisis.
For the political class, not a problem here, as they are part of the rent seeking class, and they can expect a nice directorship gig at some oligopoly corporation after their term.
The big fix for much of this is fundamentally to put more money in the wallets of regular people. This means increasing rental vacancy, limiting rent increases, and bringing rents down to 30% of people's income (or less!). It means livable incomes and government stepping in to create a social safety net to ensure that those incomes aren't flowing away immediately to pay for the basics of staying healthy.
It means breaking up corporations and reigning them in and stopping rent seeking.
All of this harms the very wealthy and even the upper middle class, who themselves are often small time landlords that benefit from low rents and renter misery, so these politically active groups block all change.