In a series of articles that he calls “The Great Divergence,” Timothy Noah advises that in the United States of Inequality, income disparity is rapidly growing and it does not bode well for our country? Here’s an excerpt from today’s posting at Slate.com:

Income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul’s classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: “You’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate.”

Wikipedia offers much more information on income distribution in the United States.