The surprising finding of this book is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, global income inequality is decreasing. Critics of globalization and others maintain that the spread of consumer capitalism is dramatically polarizing the worldwide distribution of income. But as the demographer Glenn Firebaugh carefully shows, income inequality for the world peaked in the late twentieth century and is now heading downward because of declining income inequality across nations. Furthermore, as income inequality declines across nations, it is rising within nations (though not as rapidly as it is...

Repeated surveys -- a technique for asking the same questions to different samples of people -- allows researchers the opportunity to analyze changes in society as a whole. This book begins with a discussion of the classic issue of how to separate cohort, period, and age effects. It then covers methods for modeling aggregate trends; two methods for estimating cohort replacement's contribution to aggregate trends, a decomposition model for clarifying how microchange contributes to aggregate change, and simple models that are useful for the assessment of changing individual-level effects.