Richard D. Wolff

Maybe NPR fears what Trump plans to do to its government support and so produces such stuff. Sure, there are multiple ways of looking at poverty (s at anything and everything), but when the prevailing perspectives across countless academic, media, and governmental studies speak to rising inequality, and when even major political candidates refer to disappearing middle classes and other slogans of rising inequality, one has to wonder not about the possibility of some sort of analysis that reaches an alternative conclusion but about the motives of someone who wants to use that analysis to question the prevailing view. By the way, GINI numbers inside countries have mostly shown growing inequality too. Across countries its a bit different because chiefly the stunning economic development of the People's Republic of China (even as inequality inside PRC grows too). Then too there are the myriad problems with the concept and measurement of Gini coefficients which add further wonderment about why an NPR report would use them to undermine the prevailing view of inequality's growth.