Income Inequality Is Cyclical

Author: Branko Milanovic

Publication: Nature. vol. 537, no. 7621. pp. 479-482

Date: September 2016

Excerpt:

For the past 30 years or so, income inequality has been on the rise across the globe. It has increased in the United States, China, Russia — even in Sweden and Finland, long thought to be paragons of equality.

What’s driving this increase? And does the unprecedented dominance of capitalism mean that there are no longer countervailing forces to stop inequality’s rise? Or might a self-regulating mechanism eventually reduce it, even in a capitalist world?

To answer these questions, we need both to look at our immediate past and take a longer historical view. Thanks to archival data on wages and incomes from as far back as the 1200s, we can start to do just that.

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