Tyler Cowen — “We all know that wealth inequality has gone up”

If there is one big lesson of the FT/Piketty dust-up, it is that we don’t have reliable numbers on wealth inequality. 

Now do we in fact “know” that wealth inequality has gone up? See this piece by Allison Schrager. Intuitions about wealth vs. income inequality are trickier than you might think. And on what we actually do and do not know, here is a very good comment on Mian and Sufi’s blog (for U.S. data):

I very much appreciate that you did this, and it’s an interesting and important fact that you document here, but this does not directly respond to most of the discussion. As the extreme ratios seen here (on the order of ~20) indicate, the middle 20% has very little wealth compared to the top 20%, and this has always been true. I don’t think many conservative critics are trying to argue one way or another on this front.

The current discussion is more about the concentration of wealth at the very top, particularly the 1%. And there the SCF shows little to no evidence to support increased wealth inequality – only a minimal rise in the share of wealth held by the top 1%. This is what Kopczuk and Schrager’s article is referencing, and this is the most relevant question for the debate about Piketty’s (and Saez and Zucman’s) findings of higher wealth inequality at the top.

You really need to look at *that* issue, and if you think this is impossible because “the SCF is not a huge sample” (though it does oversample at the top), you need to say so, rather than passing off an interesting but essentially distinct point as being a decisive response to critics – which, frankly, is what you’re doing in this post.

I could not have said it better myself.

Marginal Revolution  “We all know that wealth inequality has gone up”
Tyler Cowen