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Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020

Is income equality in the US today greater than in France before the French Revolution?

Allegra Taylor, Gigafact
no

While income data for revolutionary-era France is sparse, economic historians using best-available data think France's distribution then was more lopsided than in the U.S. now. One estimate calculated that 20% of the people in late 18th-century France earned 60% to 66% of the country's income. In the U.S. in 2018, the top 20% of the population made 52% of total income.

A metric used to compare income inequality is the Gini coefficient, where a higher number indicates greater income inequality. The 2017 Gini coefficient for the U.S. was 0.39, one of the higher numbers among major liberal democracies. An estimate for revolutionary-era France puts the figure at 0.59, ranking it near contemporary South Africa's 0.62, which is the most unequal among larger economies today.

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