In his feted book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty contends that wealth inequality rises inexorably under capitalism. The Financial Times has reported that, once various apparent errors are corrected, the European numbers show no tendency to rising wealth inequality after 1970. A judgment on this issue must, of course, await Prof Piketty’s response. Whatever the outcome, we are reminded that economic knowledge, especially in this area, is forged in long hours of work with sketchy and ambiguous statistical sources.
For the past two decades, the University of Texas Inequality Project has been contributing to this work. We did not set out to make, prove or disprove any grand theoretical claim.
Our main goal was to provide information, to clarify a factual record that was sparse, inconsistent and noisy. Our data on pay inequality, with estimates of income inequality, now cover most of the world from the early 1960s until (in some cases) as recently as 2012. We also find that inequality, measured within countries, rose in recent decades. But we do not find anything inexorable about this. We think that global circumstances and national policies were largely at fault. When policies and circumstances change, the rise of inequality can be stopped. Our data show that rich countries are more equal than poor countries. No surprise: to be rich is to have a large middle class. Communism defied this rule for a while, but not any more.