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.
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.