ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century belief that in advanced market societies inequality is in a downward trend has been swept aside for good. Over the last 40 years, inequality has been on the rise in the United States. By some strange irony, the Marxist theory of the absolute impoverishment of unskilled workers under capitalism found its first empirical confirmation in the United States while intellectual Marxism was definitely declining: the real federal minimum wage fell by 33% between 1968 and 2006 (Bernstein and Shapiro 2006). Falling wages at the bottom of the pay scale are not, however, the only reason for its increasing length. The other end of the scale has also moved further away. In 1970, the top 1% of wage earners received 5.1% of the American wage bill. Forty years later, in 2007, the same
fraction had increased its share to 12.2% (Piketty 2014).1 During the same period, the share of those lying slightly further down the pay scale – the group belonging to the top 10% but not the top 5% (F90-95) scarcely increased. Its share went up from 10% to 10.5% of the wage bill.
