Left-wing economists such as Thomas Piketty falsely depict the world as a place of rising inequality. His claims are gullibly repeated, even though Piketty’s factual claims are “riddled with error” and “Piketty’s measurements tend to exaggerate the rise of inequality” in time periods like the 1980s “due to uncorrected errors and dubious assumptions in his data construction.”
Now, data from the International Labour Organization shows that inequality is declining:
The Global Wage Report 2024-25 finds that since the early 2000’s, on average, wage inequality, which compares the wages of high and low wage earners, decreased in many countries at an average rate that ranged from 0.5 to 1.7 per cent annually, depending on the measure used. The most significant decreases occurred among low-income countries where the average annual decrease ranged from 3.2 to 9.6 per cent in the past two decades. Wage inequality is declining at a slower pace in wealthier countries, shrinking annually between 0.3 and 1.3 per cent in upper-middle-income-countries, and between 0.3 to 0.7 per cent in high-income countries….
The report also finds that global wages have been growing faster than inflation in recent times. In 2023, global real wages grew by 1.8 per cent with projections reaching 2.7 per cent growth for 2024, the highest increase in more than 15 years….
Wage growth has been uneven across regions, with emerging economies experiencing stronger growth than advanced economies, the report finds. While advanced G20 economies registered a decline in real wages for two consecutive years (−2.8 per cent in 2022 and −0.5 per cent in 2023), real wage growth remained positive for both years in emerging G20 economies (1.8 per cent in 2022 and 6.0 per cent in 2023).
Regional wage growth patterns varied considerably. Wage workers in Asia and the Pacific, Central and Western Asia, and Eastern Europe experienced their real wage increases at a faster rate than those in other parts of the world.
