Piketty & Saez: Income Inequality in the U.S. 1913-1998 (2003)
The Point: Nearly half a century later, this paper responds to Simon Kuznets' findings. Saez and Piketty find that over the course of the twentieth century, top income and wage shares in the United States display a U-shaped (not an inverse U-shaped) trend. Their reasoning is that shocks to capital owners during the Great Depression and World War II lowered inequality for a period, but top wage shares began to rise again beginning in the late nineteen sixties. The Quote: "We h
