New York Times Op-Ed:  Wealth Inequality Is the Highest Since World War II, by Peter Coy:

Gross domestic product is a useful metric of a nation’s economic success, but what you’d also like to know is who reaps the benefit when it grows — the rich, the poor, the middle class or everyone. During the pandemic, for example, we know that government benefits helped the poor, while stimulative monetary policy pushed up stock prices and benefited the rich in particular. What was the net result?

Three economists at the University of California, Berkeley — the postdoctoral researcher Thomas Blanchet and the professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — have created an online tool to answer that question quickly and thoroughly. The tool, which calculates how economic growth is distributed across income and wealth groups, is called Realtime Inequality. It’s valuable for two reasons: It gives fresh insight into what has happened to various strata of the U.S. population during the pandemic; and it’s effectively a prototype for a measure that could someday be officially calculated and published by the federal government.

Using the tool’s drop-down menus, you can choose the time period, the unit (household or individual adult), the strata and the definition of income or wealth that you want to graph. …

The reason the government doesn’t publish these numbers is that they’re tricky to calculate. In principle, every dollar of G.D.P. represents income to someone. But there are measurement gaps. The Current Population Survey run by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics captures less than half of national income, leaving out such things as fringe benefits and business profits.

The Berkeley researchers have solved this challenge by combining the Current Population Survey with tax data and other sources, including the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Their system parcels out the entire estimated G.D.P. to various subsets of the population, taking into account overall growth, job shifts and the performance of the financial markets. The numbers will be updated monthly. …

Saez and Zucman are left-leaning economists who favor a tax on wealth, but Zucman said the Realtime Inequality meter isn’t ideological. He said it was well received in an online presentation that the authors made on Jan. 14 to Dennis Fixler, the chief economist of the Bureau of Economic Analysis; Heather Boushey, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers; and Danny Yagan, the chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget, who collaborated with Saez and Zucman on research before taking leave from Berkeley. …

In an interview on Tuesday about the Realtime Inequality meter, Zucman said, “I think it’s going to be a paradigm change in how people analyze the economy.” He added: “Before, we talked only about growth because there was no data about inequality. I think this tool is going to change the conversation. I’m not saying it’s the final word. It’s the first step. It’s a prototype.”