I Have WAY More Stuff Than You: How Is This Normal, Just, or Right?

By Janet Spitz

Quarterly Journal of Economics

By Janet Spitz

History documents gross inequality: kings and lords took what they could, and peasants struggled along as they might. An intermediate “middle class” of favored underlings provided structural reinforcement then; a similar middle-management group provides legitimacy and reinforcement now for the richest 85 people in the world who own the same value of assets and wealth as the 3,500,000,000 poorest.

Extreme inequality is nothing new. What interrupted its reign was democracy, with its implicit promise of opportunity for all. Democracy did for a time equalize wealth—at least to a degree—in the modern industrialized nations where democracy was, in various forms, adopted.

In the United States, democracy ushered in a relative equalization of income and wealth: the Great Compression, a mid-twentieth-century narrowing of monetary difference between the top 1% and the bottom 90% of the population. This is shown in the central part of Figure 1 (above).

Source: I Have WAY More Stuff Than You: How Is This Normal, Just, or Right?