Alvin Powell at the Harvard Gazette writes about the inequality chart above:

It’s a seemingly nondescript chart, buried in a Harvard Business School (HBS) professor’s academic paper. A rectangle, divided into parts, depicts U.S. wealth for each fifth of the population. But it appears to show only three divisions. The bottom two, representing the accumulated wealth of 124 million people, are so small that they almost don’t even show up. [...] Inequality in America has been on the rise in recent years, after dipping by some measures following the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. It was a reality when Harvard philosopher John Rawls wrote his seminal text, “A Theory of Justice,” in 1971. It was a reality when now-Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) lecturer Marshall Ganz organized farm workers in the Southwest in the 1960s and ’70s. It was a reality when Nancy Oriol, now dean for students at Harvard Medical School (HMS), founded the Family Van care program in 1992. It was a reality when Government Professor Jennifer Hochschild wrote “Facing Up to the American Dream” in 1995, and when other faculty members penned books and articles on the problem’s many facets. And it was an expanding reality in 2011, when HBS Professor Michael Norton published that rectangular graph, in a study that also showed that Americans really don’t know how unequal the United States is — and that, given a blind choice, they’d rather live in Sweden, thank you very much.

Anyone who has followed the news about inequality knows that the wealth divide has starker numbers yet. In a 2014 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez found that the top 0.1 percent of the U.S. population owned 22 percent of the nation’s wealth. That’s 160,000 families whose average wealth was $72.8 million.

On the other side, the bottom 90 percent of the population (144 million families with average wealth of $84,000) owned 22.8 percent of the wealth.

That is a virtual tie.

The powers-that-be would like us to forget that such wealth conveys immense power just as it has throughout history. This wild skewing doesn’t merely cause economic pain and political imbalance, it creates (or deepens) alienation. And as we have seen the past few years since the Occupy movement sprang onto the scene, it creates active opposition to continuing a status quo that reinforces this inequality.

The question of whether this opposition will generate enough clout to close the chasm between the mega-rich and the rest of us has yet to be answered. But one thing our nation’s hoi oligoi haven’t succeeded in persuading us about is that this lopsided arrangement is the natural order and actually benefits us. As long as they don’t, hope remains that we can do some rearranging.