Social mobility and income distribution are not the same thing, and people leap to some intellectually dubious conclusions when they conflate the two. A lot of

Social mobility and income distribution are not the same thing, and people leap to some intellectually dubious conclusions when they conflate the two. A lot of comparisons are being drawn, for example, between the 1920s and today. While the income distribution curves look startlingly similar, the concentration of wealth is very different. Most of today's 1%+ are "working rich," i.e., they receive the bulk of their income from salaries and bonuses -- not from ownership or direction of capital. Most of the turn-of-the-20th-century rich were actual capitalists/industrialists -- "robber barons" who secured monopolies on commodities, trade routes, new technologies, and so forth. These robber barons built generational fortunes whose relative scale and unshakable concentration are unmatched by anything since, including today. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren enjoyed lavish fortunes not of their own merit or creation. Today's income gap appears troubling, and I don't want to downplay it. But the frequent comparisons to the Gilded Age are superficial at best, and they veer us off topic. This is true whether one is looking at the comparison from either side of the politico-economic spectrum: the pro-capitalist side (because the majority of today's elites are not capitalists, per se, but wage earners in highly paid fields like finance), or the egalitarian side (because what, exactly, are we proposing to redistribute? Opportunity? Wealth? Salary? Market demand? And how will we do this?). And that's not even touching on globalization, which seems inevitable, and which has had a major effect on the disappearance of working-class and middle-class jobs. The article touches on the effects of new technologies, access to them, and ability to master them -- but this seems pretty meritocratic unless access is restricted to the children of privileged families. That's where we need to turn our lens. That's where things start to look less meritocratic and more aristocratic. It's time we took a more nuanced view of this issue. For one thing, we should look beyond the present income inequality and toward the future implications. Is social mobility going to suffer for the next generation? Is wealth concentrating in generational amounts? Is the current power-law distribution crystalizing into a caste system? By some indications it is, and by other indications it's not. Let's go there. Let's dissect this. We need less hand-wringing and more investigation. I'd be much more troubled by an uneven playing field than by uneven scores at the end of the game. By many accounts, today's playing field is fairly uneven -- and that's where we should be focusing our attention and effort. At the same time, we need to be comfortable with the probability than a perfectly even playing field will still produce uneven outcomes. It might produce more uneven outcomes, depending upon one's choice of modeling. Nevertheless, we're looking too much at the symptoms and not enough at the underlying sickness in the system.