The World Inequality Lab led by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Facundo Alvaredo and Lucas Chancel released today the first of its kind World Inequality Report 2018. The Report aims to become the comprehensive reference report on income and wealth inequality around the world, and to stimulate extensive global and local debates about it. To pursue the essential mission to promote research on global inequality dynamics and maintain the unique World Wealth and Income Database, the Lab works in close coordination with over one hundred researchers covering nearly seventy countries.
On the first pages of the Report, state the authors:
“By developing this report, the World Inequality Lab seeks to fill a democratic gap and to equip various actors of society with the necessary facts to engage in informed public debates on inequality…
We show that income inequality has increased in nearly all world regions in recent decades, but at different speeds. The fact that inequality levels are so different among countries, even when countries share similar levels of development, highlights the important roles that national policies and institutions play in shaping inequality…
Since 1980, very large transfers of public to private wealth occurred in nearly all countries, whether rich or emerging. While national wealth has substantially increased, public wealth is now negative or close to zero in rich countries. Arguably this limits the ability of governments to tackle inequality; certainly, it has important implications for wealth inequality among individuals…
Tackling global income and wealth inequality requires important shifts in national and global tax policies. Educational policies, corporate governance, and wage-setting policies need to be reassessed in many countries.”
The World Inequality Report 2018 is a great resource of enormous data and bright analyses, based on a cutting-edge methodology, of our perturbing and troubling socio-economic and political reality. The Report, written in a very accessible manner, is available in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.
In the course of the last 15 years, Piketty et al. have masterly measured and surveyed inequality in a series of groundbreaking researches. This persistent and continuous endeavour culminated in the publishing of Capital in the 21st Century (2014) which immediately became a bestseller among academics and the general public, signifying an important shift in the way economics, social sciences, and policy makers (should) consider inequality. Within this context, economic sociologists and political economists, based on the richness of our scholarships and our moral obligation to society, must be an essential part of this programmatic shift and contribute theoretical and intellectual insights to explain the socio-political origins, mechanisms, and consequences of income and wealth inequality, on the local and global levels.
Read this new report, share it; and discuss, teach and study the topic of inequality — Act.
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Economic Sociology & Political Economy 
In a not unrelated topic I’m sure, I’ve also read that the more political equality a nation has, the more economic equality they have as well. The United States does not fare well in comparison to Western Europe in this regard.
We can arguable say that today we are living in an inequality economy since the Cold War ended, the new economics politicies introduced by the governments in the advanced industrial countries, accelerated the social inequality amongst a privileges elites controlling mainly the finance sector, and by an invisible concentration of wealth created by the manipulations of the financial institutions, which are also in many develop countries in complicity with the public economy. This anormal estructure of this new capitalism was baptised as neon-liberalism. In other words, poor countries, in Africa, Latin America or Asia, became more less protected and exposed to a brutal exploitation of their working-forces and transform them in nations without a real prospect to build a democratic and equal society. We are at present living this global economy crisis.
[…] > World Inequality Report 2018: Great Data, Bright Analysis, Perturbing Reality […]
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