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Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast.

With a programme that looks at the numbers in the news and life, and the 1970s, I'm Tim Harford.

Loyal listener Milena Kopkaowska got in touch to ask us to look into a claim to do with income and wealth inequality.

Since 1975, $80 trillion has shifted from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

In 2023 alone, it was $3.9 trillion.

That's enough to give every full-time worker in the 90% an extra $32,000 a year.

The claim appears to have been popularised by left-wing Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders,

although he uses a slightly different figure.

There has been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%.

Are these numbers right? And what do they mean?

My name is Carter Price. I am a senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation.

Carter knows all about these trillions of dollars. He's the author of the two reports that

Arlister Melena and Bernie Sanders are talking about. So how were these numbers worked out?

Step one. We took the economic growth rate

and looked at the actual growth in pay for the bottom 90% of workers. This claim is about income,

and Carter started by looking at the relationship between the incomes of the bottom

90% of workers and the economy more generally. Now, there was a time, perhaps an unusual time,

when this relationship was very stable.

From shortly after the Second World War, up to the mid-70s, you know, if the economy grew 5%,

people's wages went up 5%. If the economy grew 2%, people's wages went up 2%, more or less across the board.

Yeah. And so we saw very even growth for that 25-ish-year period. So there was an inequality,

...