The Difference Between Inequality Today And Inequality In 1973 In One Fascinating Chart

It may seem like inequality is getting worse.

As the Wall Street Journal's Justin Lahart wrote Sunday, the last time the 1% captured nearly 20% of all income was 1928.

Even Wall Street big shots are now getting worried, Lahart reported, citing Bill Gross' latest note to investors arguing inequality was reducing U.S. productivity.

But Global Health Professor Hans Rosling of Stockholm's Karolinska Institutet reminds us that we've actually come a long way in addressing inequality, if by "we" you mean the rest of the planet.

He Tweeted the following chart, showing that on a global scale, there are now more individuals earning $10 a day than ever before. Twenty-seven years ago, the global statistical mode for daily earnings was $1.

His source is a 2011 paper from the University of Utrecht: "The Changing Shape of Global Inequality 1820-2000: Exploring a new dataset." (The new dataset is one they create using novel proxies for inequality like height). While the paper is almost three years old, Rosling says he and his team at GapMinder, an amazing global economic data site, play with it all the time.

The Utrecht researchers concluded that globalization had indeed make nations more equal, but may have exacerbated inequality within the nation itself:

"The globalized world of the (late) nineteenth century produced a unimodal distribution. Processes of de-globalization in the middle decades of the twentieth century had two effects on global inequality: nation states acquired the freedom to build a welfare state that sharply reduced income inequality within countries (in the richer part of the world), but at the same time it seems to have lead to the emergence of a bi-model distribution on a global scale. The dramatic process of globalization of the final decades of the 20th century reversed both changes: it led to a strong increase in within country inequality (bringing it back to its level from before the 'egalitarian revolution' of the twentieth century), and it resulted in the sudden appearance of a unimodal income distribution on a global scale (and a small decline in between country inequality)."

In other words, living standards of less-well-off Americans may now more closely resemble those of folks half way across the world than they do their more wealthy neighbors.