>Doug, do you have info, or know where to get it, about US inequality
>back, say, to the turn of the century or further?
I've got a chart of a U.S. gini going back to 1913 at <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Stats_incpov.html>. The pre-1947 estimates came from Eugene Smolensky and Robert Plotnick, "Inequality and Poverty in the United States: 1900 to 1990," University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Public Policy, Working Paper #193 (July 8, 1992).
If you go back much further than 1913 you're working with some pretty sketchy data, and you're also dealing with a society where money incomes mattered a lot less for material welfare than they do today, or did in 1930 even.
Doug