The Pitfalls of Measuring Inequality: Reception of a Current Academic Debate and its Implications for Germany

Auten and Splinter (2024) is the latest contribution to an ongoing debate regarding the historical development of income inequality in the U.S. This debate is mainly based on the seminal work of Piketty and co-authors. Auten and Splinters’ results challenge established measurement techniques as their results indicate a much weaker increase in income inequality compared to Piketty and co-authors. This article summarises and discusses major differences between the approaches and the results. However, U.S. results on inequality are only of limited use for similar debates in Germany. This is due to the fact that the inequality debate in Germany focuses more on wealth than income inequality. Additionally, German data infrastructure prohibits any expressive replication of the approaches discussed in this article.