Richest 1% wealth share, US (admittedly, this has been flat for the last 20 years, but you can see the trend since 1980):
Pre-tax income shares, US:
A 3–4% change for most income categories isn’t anything to sneeze at (even if this is pre-tax).
You can explore the WID data through OWID to see the effect for other countries; it’s less pronounced for many but the broad trend in high-income neoliberalised countries is similar (as you’d expect to happen with lower taxation).
It’s worth noting that much of the reported increase in wealth inequality since 1989 seems to be explained by the rising share of wealth held via social insurance programs. Catherine et al. notes,
Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S. based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper shows that top wealth shares have not changed much over the last three decades when Social Security is properly accounted for. This is because Social Security wealth increased substantially from $7 trillion in 1989 to $39 trillion in 2019 and now represents 49% of the wealth of the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution. This finding is robust to potential changes to taxes and benefits in response to system financing concerns.
Since both ordinary private wealth and social insurance programs are similar in that they provide continuous streams of income to people, I think it’s likely misleading to suggest that wealth inequality has gone up meaningfully in recent decades in the United States—at least based on the reported datasets that presently exist.
Social insurance income streams are especially relevant in this context because they directly affect how much real economic power and control people have in practice. Ignoring social insurance thus exaggerates how concentrated real economic power actually is, since it underestimates the resources available to the broader population.
That said, inequality statistics are quite contentious in general given the lack of reliable data on the exact variables we care about, so I’m not highly confident in this picture. Ultimately I’m unsure whether inequality has remained roughly constant over the last few decades in the sense we should care about.
I could sympathize with the frustration, but I feel like I’m being attacked in a way that’s pretty unfair.
This question seems to presume that I have “one single source, that’s so good that I could just link to it and the debate would mostly be over.” That’s clearly not the way most people work. There’s a whole lot of points some people might assume is common knowledge within a certain community, to some extent, for the purpose of making other points, but that doesn’t come with one incredibly clean paper.
I find your other papers you linked in other comments interesting. That said, I don’t see them changing my main argument much.
I could sympathize with the frustration, but I feel like I’m being attacked in a way that’s pretty unfair.
Sorry if my previous comment came across as rude or harsh—that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t mean to attack you. I asked those questions to clarify your exact claim because I wanted to understand it fully and potentially challenge it depending on its interpretation. My intent was for constructive disagreement, not criticism of you personally.
I find your other papers you linked in other comments interesting. That said, I don’t see them changing my main argument much.
Your main argument started with and seemed to depend heavily on the idea that inequality has been increasing. If it turns out that this key assumption is literally incorrect, then it seems like that should significantly affect your argument.
Thanks. I tried adjusting the opening of this argument accordingly.
I don’t expect at the time that this point was that contentious within our community. I was naively thinking, “this point is broadly assumed to be true, and would help provide context for my main point.” I also believed/believe that it was true, but I’d agree with you that there are a lot of specific interpretations of it that wouldn’t be true.
It seems like there are interesting debates to be had here of “How should we think about inequality? What aspects of the world are become more or less equal? What measures are the most important?” I think this does get fairly far from my main topic, though at the same time, I’m happy to see that get discussed either here or elsewhere, as long as it could be understood that it’s very arguably a only-partially-related point.
From what I can tell, it very much seems the case that some important measures of inequality are both increasing and very high (the high is probably more important), and also that other important measures might be constant/low/decreasing.
I suspect that commenters here have much stronger feelings about “is inequality increasing?” than they do “does the top 0.1% of the global elite have an incredibly large amount of wealth?”
When you say inequality has been rising, do you mean income inequality or wealth inequality? What’s your source for this claim?
[Edit: reworded to be less curt and harsh]
Richest 1% wealth share, US (admittedly, this has been flat for the last 20 years, but you can see the trend since 1980):
Pre-tax income shares, US:
A 3–4% change for most income categories isn’t anything to sneeze at (even if this is pre-tax).
You can explore the WID data through OWID to see the effect for other countries; it’s less pronounced for many but the broad trend in high-income neoliberalised countries is similar (as you’d expect to happen with lower taxation).
It’s worth noting that much of the reported increase in wealth inequality since 1989 seems to be explained by the rising share of wealth held via social insurance programs. Catherine et al. notes,
Since both ordinary private wealth and social insurance programs are similar in that they provide continuous streams of income to people, I think it’s likely misleading to suggest that wealth inequality has gone up meaningfully in recent decades in the United States—at least based on the reported datasets that presently exist.
Social insurance income streams are especially relevant in this context because they directly affect how much real economic power and control people have in practice. Ignoring social insurance thus exaggerates how concentrated real economic power actually is, since it underestimates the resources available to the broader population.
That said, inequality statistics are quite contentious in general given the lack of reliable data on the exact variables we care about, so I’m not highly confident in this picture. Ultimately I’m unsure whether inequality has remained roughly constant over the last few decades in the sense we should care about.
I could sympathize with the frustration, but I feel like I’m being attacked in a way that’s pretty unfair.
This question seems to presume that I have “one single source, that’s so good that I could just link to it and the debate would mostly be over.” That’s clearly not the way most people work. There’s a whole lot of points some people might assume is common knowledge within a certain community, to some extent, for the purpose of making other points, but that doesn’t come with one incredibly clean paper.
I find your other papers you linked in other comments interesting. That said, I don’t see them changing my main argument much.
Sorry if my previous comment came across as rude or harsh—that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t mean to attack you. I asked those questions to clarify your exact claim because I wanted to understand it fully and potentially challenge it depending on its interpretation. My intent was for constructive disagreement, not criticism of you personally.
Your main argument started with and seemed to depend heavily on the idea that inequality has been increasing. If it turns out that this key assumption is literally incorrect, then it seems like that should significantly affect your argument.
Thanks. I tried adjusting the opening of this argument accordingly.
I don’t expect at the time that this point was that contentious within our community. I was naively thinking, “this point is broadly assumed to be true, and would help provide context for my main point.” I also believed/believe that it was true, but I’d agree with you that there are a lot of specific interpretations of it that wouldn’t be true.
It seems like there are interesting debates to be had here of “How should we think about inequality? What aspects of the world are become more or less equal? What measures are the most important?” I think this does get fairly far from my main topic, though at the same time, I’m happy to see that get discussed either here or elsewhere, as long as it could be understood that it’s very arguably a only-partially-related point.
From what I can tell, it very much seems the case that some important measures of inequality are both increasing and very high (the high is probably more important), and also that other important measures might be constant/low/decreasing.
I suspect that commenters here have much stronger feelings about “is inequality increasing?” than they do “does the top 0.1% of the global elite have an incredibly large amount of wealth?”