Is the U.S. story unique, or part of a broader pattern? A brief look at how the United States compares to other wealthy democracies over the same 48 years.
Every document in this treatise concerns the United States alone. That's appropriate for a policy-by-policy analysis, but it leaves an important question unanswered: would inequality have risen in the U.S. regardless of who was president, simply because it was rising almost everywhere in the developed world? The comparative literature gives a nuanced answer — broadly yes, inequality rose across most wealthy democracies, but the timing, scale, and policy response varied enough that the American trajectory is not simply a global default.
Averaged across member countries, the OECD's own Gini coefficient (a 0-to-1 measure of income inequality, where higher is more unequal) rose from about 0.29 in the mid-1980s to about 0.316 by the late 2000s — an increase of roughly 10%, occurring in 17 of the 22 OECD countries with long-run data available. Inequality was rising almost everywhere. But the starting point mattered enormously, and so did the pace.
The OECD's own historical analysis identifies the United States and the United Kingdom as the two countries where income inequality began rising earliest among wealthy democracies — in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That is an independent, international confirmation of this treatise's own finding, reached purely from U.S. domestic legislative and economic data, that Reagan's first term (1981–1985) marks the specific inflection point where the American divergence begins.
By the 2020s, the United States has one of the highest income Gini coefficients among wealthy OECD democracies — comparable to, and in some measures exceeding, every other G7 country. The U.S. Census Bureau's own long-run Gini index (a related but not identical measure, tracking pre-tax money income rather than the OECD's post-tax, transfer-adjusted figure) rose from the high 0.30s in the late 1960s to just under 0.49 by the early 2020s, and the OECD's post-tax figure for the U.S. was about 0.40 as of 2013 — still toward the top of the OECD range, even after accounting for the equalizing effect of American taxes and transfers.
France, by contrast, sits close to the OECD average, roughly between Germany and the Netherlands. Nordic and Central European countries (Slovakia, Denmark, and similar) remain the least unequal in the OECD. But even Sweden — historically one of the most equal societies in the developed world — saw its Gini coefficient rise by an estimated 38% between the mid-1980s and 2013, the largest percentage increase of any traditionally low-inequality country in the comparison, even though it started from, and remains at, a much lower absolute level than the United States.
Income Gini comparisons put the U.S. near the top of the OECD range but not off the scale. Wealth concentration is where the American pattern becomes distinctive: OECD research finds the richest 10% of households hold close to 80% of all household wealth in the United States, compared with just over 60% in Denmark and the Netherlands (themselves among the more wealth-concentrated OECD members) and considerably less at the OECD average. This lines up with a recurring finding across this treatise's 13 term documents: American wealth concentration (the top-10% share metric tracked in every Inequality Trends document) has behaved differently, and moved more persistently in one direction, than income concentration alone would suggest.