Blog Fight

Is Income Inequality a Myth?

Only if you're trying to make the numbers lie.

Don’t get your hopes up, 1 percenters, income inequality isn’t going to be debunked any time soon. But American Enterprise Institute blogger James Pethokoukis gave it a try, citing five studies that supposedly show traditional measurements of income inequality are inadequate. Liberal bloggers quickly dismantled the claim: The New Republic’s Matt O’Brien called one study’s author, who confirmed that Pethokoukis had misappropriated his research. There is some disagreement over how to interpret the numbers in inequality, but no one disagrees it is growing. “Conservatives can pretend otherwise, but the numbers won’t,” O’Brien writes. New York’s Jonathan Chait describes the incident as a case of “life imitating Annie Hall.” Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review called Pethokoukis’s premise “false in a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me kind of way.”