Jonathan Chait has a terrific takedown of inequality deniers. It’s similar in spirit to my own version, but packaged somewhat differently and I’d say more effectively.

The thing to keep in mind is that Pethokoukis doesn’t directly challenge any of these facts, though he wants his audience to think he does. He cites a bunch of figures that pick away at pieces of the general picture — here is a study showing median income may have grown more than you thought, here’s a report showing family structure helped drive inequality, and so on. His favorite sleight of hand involves citing studies that do not focus on the richest 1 percent pulling away. The gap between the top 1 percent and everybody else is the most dramatic change, and it’s also the hardest to capture, since it involves a small subset of the population. (Indeed, the idea that the income of the top 1 percent is an important economic phenomenon is itself new, and older measures of inequality aren’t really designed to capture it.) So Pethokoukis just cites figure after figure that don’t measure the 1 percent against everybody else. He is, in a word, bullshitting.

The idea here and on other issues, from climate change to fiscal policy, is to create the impression of a cacophony of conflicting ideas and evidence when there is in fact basic agreement among serious researchers.

And this calls for a video: