Has inequality in the UK actually gotten worse?

[00:00:00]How big are income inequalities in the UK?

[00:00:02]>> There's lots of different ways of measuring it. Pretty much every way you measure income inequality, the UK is pretty high, at least compared to most high-income countries. But, it's well below the level of the US. And that kind of mid-to-high level has been stable for about the last 35 years. So, you know, maybe there's nothing to see here.

[00:00:25]Usually, when people say, "Oh, well, there's nothing to see on income inequality." The first thing they do is they go, "What about wealth inequality?"

[00:00:30]On wealth inequality, there's also not much of a story over the last at least 35-40 years, in which, as measured by say the fraction of wealth held by the top 10 or top 1%. That measure has also been flat since at least the 1980s and before that it was falling.

[00:00:48]So, I'm just now telling you two things that haven't changed very much. What has changed? Well, wealth has become massively more important over time. So, total wealth in the country was about three times GDP between the 1960s and early '80s, and that's risen to about seven times GDP. And you kind of underlying that, you've got various things, but including a big property price boom that really went between the mid-'90s and the mid-2000s in particular. Loads of people have benefited from that, but lots of other people haven't benefited. And so, you've got falling home ownership, for example, for younger people. Why did I draw that bit out at the end here? What I'm saying here is that underlying those flat levels of kind of overall wealth inequality, there are these wealth inequalities between different groups or between different generations that more people are becoming worried about.