"The United States Is Becoming Like Old Europe"

"What they found startled them. As in other industrially advanced countries, income inequality in the United States fell after World War II, a period that economic historians call the 'Great Compression,' and remained stable through much of the 1970s.

"But then inequality started increasing again, with the top 1 percent of earners drawing a bigger and bigger share of overall income. Their graph showing the trend became well-known: a deep U, with inequality as acute today as it was just before the depression."

Annie Lowrey in The New York Times reports the findings of economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.