What country are we most like in terms of the distribution of income? Brazil, Canada, Germany, Iran or Norway. If you said, “Iran,” you’re right. Statistics from the Central Intelligence Agency’s 2008 World Factbook show that the economic disparity among Americans put us in the same league with Uganda, Argentina, Cameroon, Bulgaria and Iran. Of course, we are a lot richer than the nations in that second list, but still it seems like odd bedfellows for a modern industrialized nation to keep. (After all, on a per capita basis, we aren’t the richest nation in that first list, either. Can you spot the nation that is richer?)

This trend toward economic disparity has been building in the U.S. since 1980. During the 60s and 70s, income disparity reached historic lows, making us comparable to Canada, France, Switzerland and the UK today. But beginning in 1980, income disparity began to grow, peaking in 2007 at levels not seen since the 1920s. In 1979, the top 1 percent of households brought home after taxes 7.5 percent of the total income earned in the U.S. By 2007 that percentage had grown to 17 percent — more than double. Meanwhile, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the bottom 80 percent of wage earners has actually lost their share of total earned income since 1979.

And these numbers don’t reflect accumulated wealth, just income. Wealth is more difficult to measure because it relies on the assessment of assets that are tricky to evaluate because of their fluidity — the shifting market value of real estate and investments such as stocks and bonds. But these kinds of assets are much more concentrated in the upper-economic levels, thereby skewing economic disparity even more in favor of the rich. The best estimates for wealth that I could find come from a comprehensive survey of consumer finances done in 2001 — which, by the way, didn’t include any of the 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. Ten years ago, the top 1 percent of families held nearly a third of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10 percent held nearly 70 percent. That was before the Bush tax cuts that favored the upper-income brackets, so these data are underestimates of wealth accumulations today.

But even with these decade old data, that means that the top 1 percent is, on average, 50 times wealthier than the bottom 99 percent.

One might argue that economic disparity does not matter, so long as all boats are rising with the economic tide. But that turns out not to be the case. For instance, between 1979 and 2010, the bottom fifth of American households actually lost ground (-1.5 percent) in annual income when adjusted for inflation, while those in the top 5 percent grew by more than 55 percent  — when similarly adjusted. (The middle fifth did grow, but at the less spectacular rate of 7.2 percent)

When surveyed, Americans across both political parties, gender, and all income brackets estimate that we are much more equitable in terms of wealth distribution than we actually are. Americans are even in consensus about the ideal distribution of wealth. Even the top 20 percent of wage earners believe that the ideal distribution of wealth should be more like Norway’s — the country on the first list above that has the least income inequality (and also happens to be the wealthiest per capita).

Thus, even the relatively well-off — by an overwhelming majority (89 percent) — think that we as a nation are far too inequitable. It seems that Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs aren’t alone among the rich in worrying about income inequality in their nation.

More than 120 years ago, during the height of the last Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie — then one of the richest men in the world — wrote that the wealthy owed a debt to the society that had helped them achieve their great riches, and that the wealthy should actively return value to their society. Apparently, most Americans still believe in Carnegie’s vision, and many of them worry about the inequitable nation we are becoming.

Peggy Littleton Photo by THE GAZETTE FILE