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The Invention of Inequality

Everyone seems to be talking about – and condemning – today's high level of income and wealth inequality. But today’s ideology-driven debates oversimplify an issue that is exceedingly complex and affected by processes that we do not fully understand.

LONDON – Everyone seems to be talking about – and condemning – today’s rising level of economic inequality. Fueled by jarring statistics like Oxfam’s recent revelation that the world’s richest 62 people own as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion, popular support for left-wing figures like America’s Bernie Sanders and Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn is rising. But today’s ideology-driven debates oversimplify an issue that is exceedingly complex – and affected by processes that we do not fully understand.

Many of those engaged in the debate on inequality nowadays cite the French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which makes three key points. First, over the last 30 years, the ratio of wealth to income has steadily increased. Second, if the total return on wealth is higher than the growth in incomes, wealth is necessarily becoming increasingly concentrated. Third, this rising inequality must be reversed through confiscatory taxation before it destroys society.

The points might seem convincing at first glance. But the first statement is little more than a truism, and the second is falsified by Piketty’s own data, making the third irrelevant.

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