In 1990, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain was challenged in Parliament by a Labour Member of Parliament on the subject of growing inequality. "All levels of income are better off than they were in 1979," she retorted. "The honourable Member is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich... What a policy!"

That slap-down was an iconic formulation of a premise of the Thatcher-Reagan conservative revolution: Poverty is a social problem, but inequality, as such, is not. Governments should aim to increase the incomes and opportunities of all, especially the poor, but to worry about the gap between the rich and the rest is "the politics of envy".