Growing Apart

A Political History of American Inequality

Colin Gordon, Author

Introduction

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Americans today live in a starkly unequal society. Inequality is greater now than it has been at any time in the last century, and the gaps in wages, income, and wealth are wider here than they are in any other democratic and developed economy.

The dimensions of that inequality are fully described and explained in the pages that follow.  The graphics below offer a summary overview. The first distills the basic findings (for the U.S.) of Thomas Piketty’s magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century: the now-familiar “suspension bridge” of income inequality, dampened only by the exceptional economic and political circumstances of the decades surrounding World War II; the growing share of recent income gains going to the very high earners (the 1% or .01%); the stark inequality within labor income (see the top 1% and top 10% wage shares) generated by the emergence of lavishly-compensated “supermanagers”; and a concentration of wealth that fell little over the first half of the twentieth century and has grown steadily since then.

Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality

1. Contents

2. Introduction

3. Usual Suspects

4. Differences that Matter

5. Conclusion

6. Chartbook