First off, discussing pay gaps is highly polemic because we confuse pay gaps with inequality in general.

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By the 2000s the large majority of emerging economies were growing consistently faster than rich countries, so much so that global inequality at last started to fall even as the gaps within many countries increased.

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While many ofthe old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

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Since both the levels and the origins of inequality vary widely, it is hardly surprising that there is no established relationship between income gaps and financial crises.

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The widening of income gaps is a reversal of the pattern in much of the 20th century, when inequality narrowed in many countries.

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Rather than a sweeping assault on inequality itself, policymakers would do better to take on the market distortions that often lie behind the most galling income gaps, and which also impede economic growth.

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