These numbers are coming out around the same time as another important economics paper is re-emphasizing the idea that those at the bottom are having a tough time economically. The paper, by three French economists—Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, and Emmanuel Saez—showed that incomes at the top are booming as those at the bottom stagnate. On average, national income per adult has increased 60 percent in the U.S. since 1980, but most of those gains have accrued to those at the top. People at the bottom half of the income distribution are making, on average, $16,000, while the average pre-tax income of the top 1 percent of adults is about $1.3 million, the researchers found. In the 1980s, the top 1 percent of adults earned 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent. Now, they earn 81 times more.

The two papers are more proof that America is becoming a more unequal society. But does it matter that the rich are making more money than they once did? After all, Americans pride themselves on being a society in which anybody can start from anywhere and become successful. Wealth, in itself, is not problematic: Most Americans likely wish they were the ones at the top.

The problem is less with the existence of such wealth than with how it is created and preserved. For one thing, people at the top are able to use their ample resources to help their children get ahead and stay in their parents’ income bracket. People on the lower rungs of the economic ladder can’t access the same resources. “The relatively rich will skew the chances that their children will do better,” said Miles Corak, a Canadian economist who has studied how inequality informs intergenerational mobility. As children make their way through the education system, their parents’ financial situation tends to inform how successful they are: A child with a nanny, access to pre-school, a tutor, and paid-for college tuition will likely have more professional success in life than a poor child.

But it’s not just access to resources that’s important, Corak argues. Perhaps more important is the power the wealthy have in shaping societies. Because they have access to private schools, elite colleges, and homes in good neighborhoods, for example, wealthy parents have little incentive to back spending on public education, affordable housing, and other services they don’t use. Without support, these services fall by the wayside in poorer neighborhoods, yet it is those services that often do the most to increase social mobility: Access to early childhood education and good schools in safe neighborhoods have been shown, time and again, to improve children’s life prospects. “In a higher inequality society,” Corak said, “there is more of a chance that public policy will be skewed to reflect the preferences of those who have more voice.”