U.S. Income Inequality Worse Now Than In 1774: Study: Believe it or not, income inequality in the United States is worse today than it was back in 1774.
That’s what a recent report from the National Bureau of Economic Research has found. In “American Incomes 1774 to 1860,” authors Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson argue that the American colonies were exceptionally egalitarian, compared to both other nations at the time and the U.S. today. And their data even factors in slavery.
As the Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman points out, such studies should be taken with a grain of salt, given that making historical economic analyses is like “making a messy collage, collecting the disparate bits and pieces of information we have available and fashioning them into a coherent picture,” Weissman writes.
