That which was true remains true, but as it is little acknowledged, it warrants repeating.

From Collapse of the Inequality Argument? by James Freeman. A little polemical but the message is broadly correct.

What caught me by surprise was that Freeman is basically pointing out that we are not discussing income inequality in nearly the same fashion as five years ago when it was held to be the central problem of our time and occupied all the best pundit brains. We are talking about income inequality at only half or less than we did in 2014 and without nearly the same millenarian fervor.

It just sort of disappeared as a discussion piece which is kind of surprising. I was always frustrated about the economic ignorance of most the discussion, the poor mechanisms of measurement, etc. And apparently at some point the chattering class ceased chattering about it and I never particularly noticed.

Leftist politicians have been saying for years that a dramatic rise in wealth and income inequality is the central economic problem of our time. It remains the go-to explanation among Democratic presidential candidates for their myriad schemes to increase federal taxation. But the claim of an inequality surge is getting much harder to make. And even for those who cling to the belief that recent decades have led to record levels of inequality, they will have to explain why wages in the Trump era have lately been moving a little closer to equality.

On the latter point, the inconvenient truth for the inequality-obsessed appears in the most recent employment report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the past year, average hourly earnings for employees on private nonfarm payrolls have increased 3.2%. But looking beyond that overall average, we see that wages for production and non-supervisory employees are rising slightly faster. In other words, workers’ wages have lately been rising faster than their bosses’ wages. Don’t expect Bernie Sanders to credit Trumponomics.

But not all Democratic presidential candidates are as ideological as Vermont’s most famous Marxist. This week former Rep. John Delaney (D., Md.) appeared with your humble correspondent on “Deep Dive” on the video streaming service Fox Nation. When asked about recent wage gains during the Trump era compared to an Obama era characterized by rising stock prices but disappointing earnings for the average worker, Mr. Delaney responded:

I think the economy up until recently has done pretty well and I’m happy about that. And I think the Obama dynamic was a little bit distorted because if you think about the situation President Obama walked into, which is the greatest economic disruption since the Great Depression, and we put a huge amount of stimulus into the economy which obviously benefited people who owned assets because that’s really what happened. So it really did create a spike in inequality but there was no other way you had to put stimulus in.

Even accounting for the Obama inequality spike, it seems the distribution of wealth and income really hasn’t changed all that much. This column has chronicled significant flaws in the claim that recent decades have seen a massive surge in U.S. income inequality. This already shaky thesis may not survive the upcoming formal publication of a working paper by Gerald Auten of the U.S. Treasury and David Splinter of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. They find “there has been relatively little change since 1960” in the income share received by the top 1% of U.S. earners.

After a draft of the paper was released last year, Paul Solman of the PBS NewsHour of all places wrote:

You thought income inequality was rising dramatically, right? Well, so did I. In fact, maybe you thought so in part because I and journalists like me have been reporting it as fact, for decades. But maybe we’re wrong — all of us.

Mr. Solman reported that the Auten-Splinter draft paper enjoys widespread respect in the economics profession—even if not everyone is willing to admit it. According to Mr. Solman:

One tax professor friend considered the question so politically sensitive that he asked not to be quoted by name after having put it to me this way in an email when I asked if the research held up:

“There is a widespread public perception that the distribution of income and wealth has become so much more unequal, a consensus so strong that no one is really allowed to question it in public.”

This is why my friend prefers to remain anonymous. But he is hardly alone in his opinion, if not his diffidence. As University of Michigan economics professor Jim Hines wrote, regarding his tax researcher colleagues, not only is the paper “rather famous in my world; people think it is basically right — and I might add that I think it is right.”

As for wealth inequality, economic historian Phillip Magness recently reported that based on data from the Federal Reserve, the richest 1% of Americans today own only a slightly higher percentage of the nation’s wealth than the one-percenters of the early 1960s.

All as true now as it was then.

We have inequality: it shifts up and down a bit over the economic cycle. It is a bit higher in the most developed economies. It is only low when you have war, plague, drought, or other four horsemen type of collapse. No one has ever been able to achieve high economic prosperity AND low income inequality. You can have high income inequality where everyone becomes better off, or you can have low income inequality where everyone becomes equally poor. It is not possible to have both.

But do left leaning politicians really understand this? I doubt it. I suspect they quit talking about income inequality because it doesn't poll especially well. If you are in the upper 80% and everything is getting better, the appetite to put it all at risk for the bottom 20% isn't especially strong.

And speaking of the bottom 20% - there is a new paper out, The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most Nations of Europe by James D. Agresti.

I am not seeing a whole lot of research rigor but the basic message is pretty well known in economic circles. GDP is notoriously challenging to measure and even more difficult to normalize across countries with profound policy differences. Real income consumption adjusted for purchasing power parity is a perfectly fine means of measuring quintile income; just hard to do well and consistently between countries.

But when you do, almost all such studies show what this one does. If you are going to be poor anywhere in the world, be poor in America. You may not be earning much, and the various welfare programs may be uncoordinated and difficult to navigate, but when you do so, you end up being better often than the middle income quintile of most developed countries.