Inequality is Increasing Worldwide

From Wonkblog:

There’s a new report out from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development charting the rise in inequality among wealthy countries. Overall, income inequality is now at its highest level in 30 years. And, while the United States snags a lot of criticism for being the fourth most unequal country in the OECD — after Chile, Mexico and Turkey — inequality is sharply increasing just about everywhere, even in egalitarian hotspots like Sweden and Denmark.

I note again that although many of us dislike the new world economy with its billionaires and paupers, everyone is having trouble maintaining a fair distribution of wealth.

The OECD says that those nations with little or no increase in inequality were those with strong wage growth among the poor, which makes raising wages at the low end the key to reducing inequality. Obviously that depends on how you measure inequality, but it does seem to me that making the poor better off is at least as important as reducing inequality per se, so I would not mind such an approach.