Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for far higher taxation in a recent blog entry, arguing that current wealth concentration is higher than that of the Gilded Age and is about to get worse globally. The chart-topping singer Billie Eilish implored billionaires to give away their money, while New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has gone further, opining, “I don’t think we should have billionaires” because we live in “a moment of such inequality.” If anything is having a moment, it is the conviction that inequality has grown urgent enough to justify a muscular policy response.
But the facts don’t support this. Not only has global income inequality fallen over the long run — contrary to the popular narrative — but inequality has also declined in education, health, and a host of other areas. The world is now more equal across a range of factors, from lifespan and childhood survival to internet access and schooling. The more broadly one examines inequality, the more encouraging the data appear. It turns out that even the shock of COVID-19 failed to erase decades of progress toward a wealthier and more equal world.
Indeed, the data show a pronounced decline in global inequality over the past few decades, driven largely by rising prosperity in poorer countries. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, progress slowed sharply. Some indicators stalled and a few modestly worsened. But the gains accumulated before the crisis were not undone.
In short, the damage to human well-being was more limited than many feared.
Another recent analysis published in The Economist finds that global inequality in consumption spending is falling. In 2000, the richest 10% of humanity spent 40 times more than the poorest 50%. In 2025, they spent around 18 times more. Using data from World Data Lab, they find that the poorest 50% now out-consume the richest 1%, breaking from past trends.
Yet many think that only large-scale redistribution can stop runaway worldwide inequality. Figures as diverse as Amodei, Eilish, and Mamdani are far from alone in embracing this view. Over the past few years, calls for a worldwide wealth tax, a vast increase in foreign aid spending, and other unprecedented measures are gaining steam across academia, non-profits, the press, and international organizations like the United Nations.
That conclusion is premature. Getting the facts straight is essential, because misunderstanding global inequality can push policymakers toward harmful solutions.
The record on foreign aid is far less encouraging than its advocates suggest: decades of evidence show that aid frequently fails to deliver sustained development and bears no reliable relationship to long-term economic growth. Worse, the fixation on ever larger aid flows often crowds out the harder work of domestic reform. In some cases, foreign aid has been shown to weaken political institutions, entrench bad governance, and slow the process of democratization.
Wealth taxes have their own problems, from high administrative costs and enforcement challenges to low revenue production and invasion of financial privacy. These problems help explain why so many of the countries that have implemented wealth taxes in the past — such as France, Germany, and Sweden— later abolished the tax. Perhaps the worst of all, by discouraging risk-taking, wealth taxes suppress investment and growth, effects that would be felt in both rich and poor countries and would likely prove especially damaging to development in the world’s poorest economies.
Recent work on multidimensional inequality suggests that the world has not been drifting toward ever greater gaps, but that the rich and the poor have been converging in material comfort. Calls for global wealth taxes or massive new aid programs often rest on the assumption that international trade and economic freedom have failed to deliver broadly shared gains. Yet the long-term evidence suggests the opposite.
The pandemic offers two lessons here: First, it highlights just how sensitive progress is to disruptions in markets. It depends on conditions that allow growth to occur and persist, including functioning markets and stable institutions. Many of the proposed policy solutions risk undermining that progress.
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The second lesson is that while the pandemic represented a hurdle in the path of progress, the long-term trend toward lower global inequality is holding strong.
Alarmist narratives shape public opinion and encourage policymakers to pursue sweeping interventions that may do more harm than good. A clearer view of the data counsels caution rather than panic.
Chelsea Follett is the managing editor of HumanProgress.org and a policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity at the Cato Institute. She is also the author of “Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World.”
