Here's a finding that would have made for great occupy sign last year: American income inequality may be more severe today than it was way back in 1774 -- even if you factor in slavery.

That stat's not actually as crazy (or demoralizing) as it sounds, but it might upend some of the old wisdom about our country's economic heritage.

The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard.

Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of.

Suffice to say, times have changed.

Before we dive into their findings, a word of caution about the study. When economists reach back this far into the thinly recorded the past, they're not so much taking a snapshot of what life was like as they are making a messy collage, collecting the disparate bits and pieces of information we have available and fashioning them into a coherent picture. In this case, Williamson and Lindert use occupational directories, tax lists, post-revolutionary census documents, and earlier scholarship, among other resources to build approximations of what people earned when we were getting ready to start turning our muskets on the British. Inherently, such a process involves lots of conjecture.

In the end, the pair find that the colonies were an exceedingly egalitarian place, financially, if not politically. The chart below, adapted from the Williamson and Linderts' tables, compares the original 13 colonies to contemporary England and the Netherlands (including the former Kingdom of Holland) using a popular measure of inequality known as the Gini coefficient. The closer a Gini figure gets to 0, the more evenly a country's income is divied up. The closer they get to 1, the more of a country's wealth goes to its rich. Note: the colonies have the lowest number of the bunch by far here.