Inequality in the US-II

Analysis of education data confirms it has worsened

Last month in this column (“Inequality in the US”, Business Standard, December 18), I pointed to worsening inequality in the United States, where, by the end of the 20th century, economic growth slowed and inequality of income and wealth grew. Whatever gains there were, benefited smaller slices of the population at the top. Trend analysis using tax data received a thrust when Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez in a 2003 paper used French data to demonstrate “vertiginous” growth of income at the top during the 1970s and 1980s. US data was subsequently used to show growing inequality of