The Left whines about "increasing inequality" and the disappearance of the middle class but as always, it is subterfuge. They simply want an excuse to increase equality, which is a process like entropy that involves taking from the productive and giving to the less productive so that everyone feels "safe" because there are no standards anymore.

As usual, for the Left, no separation between cause and effect exists: inequality is the cause of inequality, and the solution, equality, is created by enforcing equality. They do not understand how conditions lead to responses and how what we see of reality is in fact the results of a cause somewhere else. Not surprisingly, their solutions are unrealistic as a result.

If we look to the causes of inequality, we realize there can be only two: either the top group gained all the power, or the bottom group gave away power, for example by becoming less competent. We can see some evidence for this in the increasing inequality of song composition:

From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%. In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.

About two decades ago we began to "democratize" songwriting as studios became less expensive and more easy to fit into the home thanks to the rise of the personal computer. This meant that more people were making songs, but instead of leading to greater diversity, this caused a streamlining effect because most of the output was crap so people were driven more toward big names instead of toward niches.

In the same way, in our society, the declining quality of the average individual has caused the vast inequality we see. Most people are not very competent, and by sending women to work, we have both doubled the workforce and fragmented the family, so more singletons are striving alone and not benefiting from dual incomes.

Immigration added to this by bringing in many people from low-average-IQ third world countries, further lowering the average income per household and also adulterating the workforce to the point where companies hire more people to do the same jobs, breaking those jobs down into simple tasks and paying them less.

Hilariously, the Leftist solution to inequality would make this even worse: by transferring money from the successful to the unsuccessful, they would swell the ranks of the unsuccessful and concentrate power in the hands of relatively few. Not surprisingly, we see that across the third world: a handful of wealthy families ruling over a vast, incompetent, and clueless herd.