Top of the Charts
Chart of the Week | Explaining rising inequality in the United States
There are several factors behind rising inequality south of the border. In our view, the main one is the changing nature of the economy, which is increasingly dominated by capital at the expense of labor.
For decades now, a growing share of income has been captured by corporate profits, and therefore by capital owners. By contrast, the share going to workers is now near an 80-year low.
Several forces help explain this:
- Big Tech concentration
- Globalization and weaker labor bargaining power
- Automation
- The rise of intangible assets (software, data)…
And with AI, this trend is likely to accelerate.
In other words, inequality is rising less because wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living… and more because profits are taking an ever-larger share of the pie.