Longevity, education, and the huge new worldwide increases in equality – American Enterprise Institute

If we widen our gaze from income inequality, it should be almost immediately apparent that a number of remarkable worldwide trends that are not only improving the human condition overall, but also making that condition markedly less unequal.

@cdw21 via Twenty20

Is the human condition becoming more unequal? A chorus of authoritative voices today insists that the answer is yes, unquestionably so. Inequality, the voices say, is sharply on the upswing in America, as everyone is supposed to know. It is also on the rise throughout other affluent democracies, they inform. We further hear that growing worldwide inequality is all but foreordained by the global triumph of capitalism: in 2014s runaway international bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty even has a formula to prove it.

The trouble with todays received wisdom about growing inequality, though, is that it focuses almost exclusively on the matter of economic inequality, and usually more narrowly still on only income inequality. Although this distinction may sound unobjectionable, it is actually quite problematic in two key respects.

For one thing, our true ability to measure economic inequality remains far less precise than is generally understood. Even in data-rich America, for example, statistics on the nations wealth distribution are at best rudimentary. Estimates of economic inequality differ dramatically depending on whether one looks at personal income or instead examines personal consumption, which seems to be distributed much more evenly.

This excerpt is part of a chapter that appears inAnti-Piketty Capital for the 21stCentury, 2017 the Cato Institute. Used by permission. Copies are availablehere.

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Longevity, education, and the huge new worldwide increases in equality - American Enterprise Institute