And without the protest movement, the new data might not have penetrated beyond the world of academic specialists. In the wake of this work, a protest movement directed at inequality, the Occupy Movement, sprang up in 2011 in response to the economic and financial crisis of 2008, drawing widespread support for a critique of the wealth and power of “the 1%.” Without the work of Piketty and Saez, the now well-known slogans about “the 1%” might not have appeared. They made their data series easily available starting around 2007. The first was the careful empirical work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, who used a variety of sources to compile data series on trends in the concentration of income among the very rich – the top 1% and above – which had not been available before (Piketty & Saez, 2003). government data on income distribution have shown rising inequality of income among households, although the official data have not adequately charted the rise of the share of income of the very rich, due to under-sampling and omission of capital gains income.Ģ Then a few years ago, two interacting developments catapulted inequality to its current high degree of public attention. In the 1990s, new and highly publicized fortunes arose in hi-tech, finance, and other sectors. After a long period when the rich had kept a low profile, an open display of great wealth usually associated with earlier periods in history returned in the U.S. Starting in the 1980s, the mass media advertised the growing number of billionaires. However, evidence of increasing inequality has been emerging for some time.
1 Rising economic inequality has attracted a good deal of attention in recent years, among academic specialists, the general public, and politicians.
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