Rising inequality is the great scourge of our times. We are supposed to believe that the Republic is quite literally rotting before our very eyes as the plutocrats take ever more and the rest of us sink into abject penury.

Of course, this does rather depend upon the idea itself being true, that we have some massive rise in inequality. And that isn’t as obvious as some seem to think. The abject penury most certainly isn’t there, that’s for sure. It’s still true that even the poorest Americans live better than most of current humanity and better than nearly any human before recent decades.