Continuing on our theme of the day, here’s the total net worth of the Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest people:
This might actually understate things since it’s a global list, not just an American one. But even at that, the wealth of the world’s richest people has gone up nearly 5x in the past 35 years.
My point in putting up all these charts today isn’t to prove that income inequality has gone up any particular amount. It’s just to show that there are lots of data points which simply aren’t consistent with the notion that income inequality has hardly gone up at all. You can look at the sluggish incomes of the middle class; the rising wealth of the top 1 percent; the skyrocketing wealth of the top 0.01 percent; or any number of other things, and they all point in the direction of income inequality that’s doubled or tripled or more over the past four decades. Given all this, it’s simply not plausible to argue that there’s nothing going on.
