SLATE'S Timothy Noah has just wrapped up a ten-part series on the rise of economic inequality in America. Most of Mr Noah's instalments are devoted to examining the impact of one of the usual suspects—immigration, trade, de-unionisation, education, executive pay, etc—on the level of inequality in the United States. I found Mr Noah's series disappointing from the start because he failed squarely to confront recent findings that challenge the premise of his exercise. In his final effort, Mr Noah does touch on the possibility that reports of rising inequality have been greatly exaggerated only to wave it off. Mr Noah cites the Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds, but he might have checked in with Robert Gordon, an economist from Northwestern University. In a recent paper weaving together several strands of new research, Mr Gordon reports that improved use of income datasets "shows that there was no increase of inequality after 1993 in the bottom 99 percent of the population, and can be entirely explained by the behavior of income in the top 1 percent." So we are left needing an explanation for the rise of "the stinking rich", as Mr Noah calls them. But when it comes to rising inequality, that's all there is to explain. Maybe the subject doesn't merit a ten-part series after all.

Mr Gordon's surprising conclusion is based upon recent studies showing that measured income inequality has been overstated due to inadequacies in traditional methods for constructing price indices and estimating real income. In the latest version of a much-discussed paper Christian Broda and John Romalis find that

the relative prices of low-quality products that are consumed disproportionately by low-income consumers have been falling over this period. This fact implies that measured against the prices of products that poorer consumers actually buy, their “real” incomes have been rising steadily. As a consequence, we find that around half of the increase in conventional inequality measures during 1994–2005 is the result of using the same price index for non-durable goods across different income groups.

Many popular narratives about inequality are grounded on the alleged fact that wages and incomes at the middle and bottom of the distribution have been stagnant for decades. It appears that this, too, may be an artefact of insufficiently sophisticated methods for building the price indices used to calculate rates of inflation. Using an updated price index, Christian Broda, Ephraim Leibtag, and David Weinstein find that

the real wages at the 10th percentile increased by 30 percent from 1979 to 2005. In other words, the real wages of low earners have not remained stagnant, as suggested by conventional measures, but actually have been rising on average by around 1 percent per year.

Surely there are intelligent objections to these studies. But taken together they are impressive and deserve careful consideration. Mr Noah's informative review of the inequality literature could have offered a less partial and more useful picture by discussing them.