Colin Gordon - A Dismal Report Card on Global Inequality
The global
maldistribution of wealth and income is now so stark, we have taken to
comparing the incomes or fortunes of just a few
individuals to vast swaths of the world’s population. Behind those
jaw-dropping ratios, there is a more complex story that plays out across time
and across regions.
The World Inequality Report 2018 painstakingly
documents the dimensions of income and wealth inequality, around the globe,
within and across countries. Boiled down to one sentence, the conclusions of
the 2018 Report echo those of Branko Milanovic and others: Wealth and income
inequality are widening within countries, even as global
development slowly narrows the gap betweencountries. These patterns
are evident in the summary of regional trends below. The share of income going
to the top 10 percent has increased moderately in Europe; it starts high and
stays high in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East; it has taken off—for
different reasons—in the United States, Russia, and Asia.
This work reflects the
efforts of scores of researchers, following the lead of Thomas Piketty and
colleagues, in assembling long runs of comparable wealth and income data, for
much of the world, and for much of the last century. That data has been
maintained since 2011 in the World Inequality Database; the annual report, released late
last year, offers us a snapshot of telling trends and patterns. With this, and
future annual reports, the researchers hope to “fill a democratic gap and to
equip various actors of society with the necessary facts to engage in informed
public debates on inequality.”
Their innovative data
collection (across time and across settings) relies heavily on fiscal data
(that is, from tax returns)—a source that both provides much longer and
complete long runs of data (since 1913 in the United States) than the Census or
other survey sources, and which captures the concentration of wealth and income
at the very top of the distribution in ways the survey data cannot.
The research team is
determined to turn more of the conversation to wealth inequality. Not only is
wealth inequality much steeper than income inequality in almost all settings
(the highest-earning 1 percent in the United States take home 20.2 percent of
national income; the richest 1 percent claim 41.8 percent of all wealth),
but—in a world where capital income is displacing labor income—it is
increasingly the root cause of income inequality as well… read more:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/world-inequality-report-2018
