This is an excerpt from an op-ed that originally ran in CNN. Read the full op-ed here.

In recent years, researchers have debated the simple question of whether inequality has risen a lot or a little in the United States over the past half-century. Lots of arguments in this debate surround highly technical issues like, “Should the income of owners of ‘pass-through businesses’ be reported as wages or business profits?” or “Is income that is not reported on tax returns mostly earned by rich or middle-class households, and how do you know?”

But we’ve identified available data that sidesteps nearly all these complexities and demonstrates that inequality has indeed risen enormously: what individual Americans earn in the labor market.