Phil Gramm’s new book makes the case that the official statistics overstate inequality in America and understate progress and mobility.

Alexis de Tocqueville opened Democracy in America by pronouncing, “among the new things that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcefully than the equality of conditions.” Today, Bernie Sanders says that the United States has “more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on earth.” “We are the most — one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world,” proclaimed Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times in a lecture last week.

The views of Sanders and Hannah-Jones are sadly common among progressives, and they drive policy arguments. When Joe Biden came into office, Politico wrote that “President-elect Joe Biden will take office later this month with bold plans to fight growing economic inequality” and the Hill wrote that “a key priority of the Biden administration is to lessen the disparity in income between the wealthiest U.S. households and the rest of the populace.”