This says it improved significantly from 1940 until 1980, then made a turn for the worse. So it's about the same as 100 years ago, but for a big part of that 100 years, it was better.

...and about twice what it was 50 years ago. How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?

Not sure, but it seems in France the situation in degrading. The same 1% being richer while workers / students waiting in line for food charity stories were common. Part of it might be due to COVID, but I can't shake the feeling that business management (influenced by anglo-saxon/american culture) is harder than before and squeezes employees. Not only a feeling, I worked on precarious jobs that shouldn't exist, and we saw employees having materially impossible daily duties (due to bad software unable to organize things).

I suspect that people self-manage a lot more if the pay is right. If they stop doing that it seems like you need a more expensive manager, or perhaps you do.

well partly but my comment was more systemic, a lot of "new management" was about naive quantitative approaches. measure stupid traces / outputs and forcing people to hit target objectives without looking at the workflow, tooling and team dynamics

people with enough skill and compatible mindsets need no management, they care, they will innovate, improve, repair

if the structure is at odds with that, they will ask to compensate the pain by large salary bumps because pleasure is turned into pain

> How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?

They didn’t import millions of poor people to do all the dirty or unpleasant jobs in their countries.

Japan didn't, but France and Sweden does have a lot of immigrants.

Americans voted to give rich people more money and those countries didn't.

What happened in 1929?

That is correct.

It is so correct not to overlook it.

Seemed almost like an elephant in the room for a minute there.

But looking back, was it a market "correction" or maybe just a rug-pull?

You probably had to be there.

But we knew there was nothing like it until the 1970's.

So many of the people who had lived through 1929 were still alive.

Unless you were quite fortunate in the early 1970's, you would realize that 2008 was a non-event by comparison.

And what was happening then? In 1916 a socialist got 6% of the vote for president (by 1920 he was in prison, but still got 3% of the vote). You had the green corn rebellion, 1919 bombings, Seattle general strike of 1919, Boston police strike, steel and coal strikes, Palmer raids, first red scare. Then the 1924 immigration act and creation of the US border patrol (echoes of today), cutting off most European immigration. Then up to 1932 and the Bonus Army and sut down strikes and New Deal overwhelmingly affirmed in the 1936 election.

There was the same amount of inequality a century ago in the US, so what happened at that time.