Over the past few decades, global inequality has either risen sharply or begun to moderate, depending on how you look at it. Inequality has risen in the sense that inequality within countries is often higher than it used to be.
As Thomas Pikkety and others have shown us, for example, inequality in the United States (US) has been rising since the 1970s, and is now at levels last seen nearly a hundred years ago, in the 1920s.1 Similar trends are visible in many other countries.