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...
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.