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But if you look at the same educational groupings and examine only data for full-time workers, the 90:10 ratios now fall in a range of just 3.5 to 4.5 — much, much lower. In the grouping where the difference is greatest (college graduates) people at the 90th centile make just 4.5 times — no longer 44 times — what people in the 10th centile make.

What has changed since 1980 to cause bigger differences in how much people work? Leamer and Fuentes argue it’s the change from manufacturing to neurofacturing. In manufacturing, large teams of not necessarily very well educated workers have to gather together and work very hard for a specified number of hours. Because the work is hard and has to be done all together, continuously, during strictly controlled hours, the pay has to be good.

But these days more and more people work in neurofacturing, at jobs that, though they involve deadlines (Greetings, dear Editor!), can be done in a much more flexible way. They’re not necessarily gig-economy jobs, but in many of them how much you work and earn is more up to you than it was when you had your place on an assembly line.

A second big change is that more people are much more educated than they used to be. And they acquired their fancy educations at considerable cost, both in tuition (this is a story about the U.S.) but also in foregone earnings during the several years it took them to acquire their advanced degrees. If they weren’t going to work and earn a lot, their education would not have made investment sense — however enjoyable and fulfilling it may have been. (That educated people work much too hard is the thesis of a trendy new book The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, written by a presumably completely devoured elite: a 50-year-old Yale professor with an endowed chair and a 15-page c.v.)

At one time, Leamer and Fuentes argue, either hard work or talent got you a decent income. Now, increasingly, the highest incomes go to talented people who also work very hard. They aren’t a dime a dozen.

Rising inequality doesn’t prove capitalism is evil. It does show that times and technologies have changed.