“Inequality” is a term that has been tossed about quite a bit. The Occupy movement, to Piketty’s book, to debates over the minimum wage, to Greg Mankiw‘s defense of the 1%. Just today Mark Thoma published an op-ed on inequality. A few days ago John Cochrane had a post about why we care about inequality.
One of Cochrane’s main points is that the term “inequality” has been used in so many contexts, and to refer to so many different things, that it is ceasing to lose meaning. I’ll agree with him on this completely. If you want to talk about “inequality”, you have to be very clear about what precisely you mean.
There are three things that people generally mean by “inequality”:
- The 1% versus the 99%. That is, the difference in average annual income of the top 1% of all households versus the average annual income of…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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