On Wednesday, while delivering a speech largely about income inequality and economic mobility, a populist president invoked a populist pope. After rattling off a laundry list of dire statistics, President Obama cited Pope Francis:

“Since 1979, when I graduated from high school, our productivity is up by more than 90 percent, but the income of the typical family has increased by less than 8 percent. Since 1979, our economy has more than doubled in size, but most of that growth has flowed to a fortunate few. The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income -- it now takes half. Whereas in the past, the average C.E.O. made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s C.E.O. now makes 273 times more. And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country. So the basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed. In fact, this trend towards growing inequality is not unique to America’s market economy. Across the developed world, inequality has increased. Some of you may have seen just last week, the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How can it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?'”

This is a worldwide problem, as the pope made clear, but in this country it’s particularly pernicious.

A study released last month by the World Economic Forum surveyed nearly 1,600 world leaders from academia, business, government and the nonprofit sector and found that of the top 10 trends facing the world in 2014, income inequality was second on the list. (According to the report, the top concern was “rising societal tensions in the Middle East and North Africa.”)

And although in America 51 percent of all income earned went to the wealthiest fifth of the population while only 3 percent went to the poorest fifth of the population, Americans were among the least likely to view inequality as a serious problem in the spring 2013 Pew Global Attitudes Project Survey.