I half wonder if the issue of inequality is that America may have a fatter right tail on the distribution rather than an ever-narrowing tail. Instead of only having the Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, etc 0.001% wealthy, we have a 5-6% band of households who are millionaires[0] and that makes the wealth more visible when it’s a handful of people in your town or social circle than when it was only a handful of people in the nation.

In other words, things might be getting better for the upper middle class as compared to 150 years ago, while the lower and lower middle class remains similarly situated. (If you model their economic contributions as hours-of-labor, that’s not all that surprising an outcome.)

[0] Mere millionaire is nearly meaningless at this point IMO despite the political rhetoric against the “millionaires and billionaires”. A million bucks, half tied up in a house, provides a passive income stream of around $20K/yr. It’s the $10MM (maybe $7MM) mark where I start to think of unequal privilege being a possible concern.