> What is there is only due to India and China starting to have something resembling a middle class (but even so their standard of living would be unacceptable from someone who grew up in the US.)
I don't understand what you mean when you say it's "only" due to India and China starting to have a middle class. That is literally the definition of decreasing inequality globally: people who were previously below middle class have increased their standing.
> (but even so their standard of living would be unacceptable from someone who grew up in the US.)
As someone who actually has a very real sense of what middle-class standard-of-living in India actually is, I'd contest this claim.
But even if we ignore that, the fact that a developed country's standard of living is still below the US's standard of living doesn't contradict the statement that the inequality has decreased, because the difference between the two is much smaller than it was 50 years ago.
> I don't understand what you mean when you say it's "only" due to India and China starting to have a middle class. That is literally the definition of decreasing inequality globally: people who were previously below middle class have increased their standing.
Two points:
1) Income inequality in these countries is very similar to that in the US. In the case of China, where I am, it is arguably worse than the US. So they are not producing a decrease in global income inequality -- rather they are helping accelerating inequality by dramatically increasing the inequality in the two largest nations.
2) The concept of middle class is completely orthogonal to the concept of income inequality. Whether the middle class is increasing or shrinking tells you nothing about if income inequality is increasing or shrinking. Being middle class simply means you are bought into the system, so not working class, but not wealthy enough to not work, so not upper class. You a house and your children are being well educated. You have a vested interest in maintaining the society but not the power to control it.[1] The middle class be grown and it can shrink. It has no connection to quantiles. It has no connection to the median or average income levels other than how they relate to the cost of living. You can have low income inequality with a tiny middle class (classic low development nation). You can have high income inequality with a large middle class (traditional example being the US). You can have high income inequality with a small middle class (typically middle income countries such as Chile). Of course you can have, what in my mind is the ideal, low income inequality with a large middle class (Sweden being a good example).
Because that's only two countries out of the whole world AND income inequality in those countries is still terrible despite the situation improving substantially.
I don't understand what you mean when you say it's "only" due to India and China starting to have a middle class. That is literally the definition of decreasing inequality globally: people who were previously below middle class have increased their standing.
> (but even so their standard of living would be unacceptable from someone who grew up in the US.)
As someone who actually has a very real sense of what middle-class standard-of-living in India actually is, I'd contest this claim.
But even if we ignore that, the fact that a developed country's standard of living is still below the US's standard of living doesn't contradict the statement that the inequality has decreased, because the difference between the two is much smaller than it was 50 years ago.