Gary Stevenson says 'your kids will be poorer than you' — as U.S. income inequality widens

Aditi Ganguly

Tue, May 19, 2026 at 10:45 AM EDT 11 min read

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The rich are getting richer and income inequality is widening.

The top 1% of U.S. households controlled almost a third (31.9%) of the nation’s wealth in Q4 2025, according to Federal Reserve data (1). Of those, the top 0.01% — the richest of the rich — controlled a whopping 14.5%.

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This worries former trader-turned-economist Gary Stevenson, who was a guest on a recent episode of The Prof G Pod, hosted by Scott Galloway.

“What I see is rapidly growing inequality of wealth,” Stevenson told Galloway on the podcast (2). He added that this is “directly causing rapidly increasing poverty [and] rapidly falling living standards.”

The result? "Your kids will be poorer than you,” he says.

In his view, one of the big problems is that while the billionaire class is rising, the middle class is shrinking. “People need to understand that we do not live in an infinite sum world and you cannot have a group of people who own everything unless you and your group of people own nothing,” he said.

While wealth taxes, estate taxes and stricter tax enforcement could potentially reverse this trend, what can the average American do when the cards seem stacked against them?

Growing income inequality

If it feels like life is less affordable these days, it’s not just your imagination.

In terms of labor share, which is the percentage of total output that American workers take home, it fell to 54.1% — making it the lowest level recorded since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping this data in 1947 (3). Meanwhile, U.S. households in the top 1% gained at least 101 times more wealth than the median household between 1989 and 2022, according to a 2025 Oxfam report (4).

And that gap is expected to widen. Tax reforms in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for example, are estimated to reduce the tax bill of the highest-earning 0.1% by roughly $311,000 in 2027, while the lowest-income households are expected to face tax increases (5).

The report describes this as the “single largest transfer of wealth upwards in decades.”

Tax cuts aren’t the only reason for this growing disparity. Income inequality has “skyrocketed” over the past three-and-a-half decades due to “intentional policy choices that suppressed wages for typical families to accelerate income growth at the top,” according to the Economic Policy Institute (6). By its calculations, middle-class household incomes “would be roughly $30,000 higher today if their incomes had simply kept pace with average income growth since 1979.”