“The Duke of Bedford had no counterpart in America,” Dr. Lindert said. “Even the richest Charleston slave owner could not match the wealth of the landed aristocracy.” Indeed, England’s 1 percent were so rich that the country’s average national income was nearly as high as that of the colonies, despite the markedly greater prosperity of what today we might call the American middle class.

Today, the opposite is true, Dr. Lindert said: “The rest of the world can’t come close to the 1 percent in America.”

This portrait of colonial America as the world’s great egalitarian exception would probably come as a surprise to most Yanks today. But, though Dr. Lindert and Dr. Williamson’s data are new, the portrait they paint fits with contemporary accounts.

In a letter he wrote from Monticello in 1814, Thomas Jefferson applauded America’s economic equality. “We have no paupers,” he wrote to Dr. Thomas Cooper, an Anglo-American polymath and frequent Jefferson correspondent. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

By contrast, Jefferson believed, as the Lindert and Williamson research confirms, that members of America’s 1 percent were worse off than their European counterparts:

“The wealthy, on the other hand, and those at their ease, know nothing of what the Europeans call luxury. They have only somewhat more of the comforts and decencies of life than those who furnish them.”

Interestingly, particularly in view of today’s inequality wars, Jefferson didn’t pull his punches about which social order was preferable. “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?” he opined about egalitarian America, and then did a little calculation showing that the overall happiness of Americans far outweighed that of the English, for whom “happiness is the lot of the aristocracy only.”

It wasn’t just the Americans who perceived their society to be more economically equal than the Old World. Foreign visitors noticed, too. After his famous journey to America in the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville returned home to France to report that “nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions among people.”