He's wrong because he's not looking at enough data. The 1930s to 1975 was an anomaly in wealth distribution. The prevailing trend if you look at a another centu

He's wrong because he's not looking at enough data. The 1930s to 1975 was an anomaly in wealth distribution. The prevailing trend if you look at a another centuries worth of data is different: In the 18th and 19th centuries western European society was highly unequal. Private wealth dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families who sat atop a relatively rigid class structure. This system persisted even as industrialisation slowly contributed to rising wages for workers. Only the chaos of the first and second world wars and the Depression disrupted this pattern. High taxes, inflation, bankruptcies, and the growth of sprawling welfare states caused wealth to shrink dramatically, and ushered in a period in which both income and wealth were distributed in relatively egalitarian fashion. But the shocks of the early 20th century have faded and wealth is now reasserting itself. As a general rule wealth grows faster than economic output, or in other terms: r > g (where r is the rate of return to wealth and g is the economic growth rate). Other things being equal, faster economic growth will diminish the importance of wealth in a society, whereas slower growth will increase it (and demographic change that slows global growth will make capital more dominant). But there are no natural forces pushing against the steady concentration of wealth. Only a burst of rapid growth (from technological progress or rising population) or government intervention can be counted on to keep economies from returning to the “patrimonial capitalism” that worried Karl Marx. Governments should step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability down the road. In simple terms, rich peoples' invested wealth grows faster then poor peoples' wealth due to compounding interest. This is the true reason for the wealth gap AND this is the prevailing economic theory of wealth inequality among academia.