Plain-language explainers. Every factual claim links to the research it comes from; technical detail is a click away, never the only version.
intro
Income inequality is how unevenly income is spread across people in a society — and whether it is rising is one of the most-studied questions in economics.
intermediate
Two families of measures dominate — summary indexes like the Gini coefficient, and top-income shares from tax data — and the choice of data source changes the answer.
intro
Simon Kuznets proposed in 1955 that inequality rises then falls as a country industrializes. Sixty years of data have complicated that idea — which is exactly why it still matters.