We know of the great inequality in England and France in the late 19th century through vivid portrayals in novels, movies and television. A few hundred families owned huge estates; industrialists and the bankers who had financed their enterprises had become enormously wealthy, while the industrial workers in the growing cities lived in poverty. This was the era of Upstairs Downstairs in England, La belle époque in France. The United States did not have the same inequality of land ownership, but the great industrial, oil and banking families lived in the Gilded Age.
After World War One and especially after World War Two, income inequality steadily declined. And there emerged a consensus that economic growth, with its rising levels of education, would lead to greater equality.
However, since the early 1980s, income inequality has been increasing again. The World Economic Forum in Davos identifies severe income inequality as a major global...
George Fallis is University Professor and a professor of economics and social science at York University. He is the author of Rethinking Higher Education: Participation, Research and Differentiation (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) and Ideas and Democracy (University of Toronto Press, 2007).
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