I ran across two interesting pieces in the Economist this week. In the first piece, they presented a chart collated from a recent paper examining countries not only on their median and mean wealth, but their inequality of wealth in determining which country one would most like to live in if you didn't know which wealth quintile you'd be in. Unsurprisingly, the US did significantly worse on this measure than, say, median GDP per capita in PPP.

And yet, in the second piece from the Democracy in America blog, the author quotes a number of recent studies that challenge that income inequality has increased at all in the last decade or two, and that real wages for the bottom 10% have actually grown at a pretty decent clip in the last 30 years. Most of the inequality seen in other measures, they contend, are due to distortions in the measurement technique or can be stripped out by eliminating the top 1% of earners (i.e. you have 'super rich' getting richer, but everyone else's income inequality hasn't really gotten any worse).

So: which viewpoint is likely true? I think it's reasonable to argue that the US is in general a less equal society than many of our rich country counterparts, and always has been. But is it getting worse? Have middle and lower class wages really been stagnant since the 70s? This is a commonly quoted statistic, but I think the reality might be more complex.

Lastly, how should the above answers affect policy considerations?