Economist and Mises Institute Associated Scholar Robert Ekelund recently teamed up with former US Senator Phil Gramm and John Early to write The Myth of American Inequality: How Gernment Biases Policy Debate. The book was released this month by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
In it, the authors explore some of the many ways that the debate over inequality in the United States is based on bad research, bad data, and a variety of other misconceptions. I recently asked Prof. Ekelund about some of the ways these errors affect our thinking on US inequality versus the rest of the world.
Ryan McMaken: For many years, we’ve been hearing about how the United States is unique among industrialized nations in that it has unusually high levels of inequality. But this