For decades, there’s been no surer route to success within academic social science and history departments, or on the left side of the partisan divide, than to lament the persistence and rise of economic inequality in the United States. Some even maintain that inequality has transformed the nation into an oligarchy rather than a constitutional republic. In 2014 Bernie Sanders denounced “the obscene and increasing level of wealth and income inequality in this country” as “immoral, un-American, and unsustainable.” And more broadly, in 2020 The Economist, channeling Jane Austen, proclaimed it “a truth universally acknowledged that inequality in the rich world is high and rising.”
