“The poor you will always have with you,” said Jesus. Despite vast rises in wealth, mainly over the last century, this remains true today because we define poverty relatively. Some object to this judgment: has destitution not disappeared from high-income countries and is it not diminishing in the developing world? The answer is: yes, although much poverty remains. But we are social animals. As stomachs fill, we wish to participate fully in our societies. But rising inequality is in the way.

As the US Congressional Budget Office noted in a fascinating recent study, for the 1 per cent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 per cent between 1979 and 2007, reaching 17 per cent of the total. For the others in the top quintile of the distribution, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 per cent. For the 60 per cent in the middle (the 21st to 80th percentiles), the growth in average real after-tax household income was a little less than 40 per cent. For the bottom quintile, average real after-tax household income rose about 18 per cent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states that “the wealthiest Americans have collected the bulk of the past three decades’ income gains”. Moreover, it notes, most of these gains accrued to executives and finance professionals.

An important question is whether similar shifts are happening – or are likely to happen – in the UK and other high-income countries. This was the theme of a discussion sponsored by the UK’s Resolution Foundation in November.* The conclusion I drew was that, although the forces for greater inequality seen in the US were at work across the high-income countries – a point confirmed by the OECD’s recent analysis – outcomes differed in terms of levels and trends.**