Incomeinequality has increased in this country and in practically every Europeannation in recent decades. The best measure of that change is the Gini index,named after the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who designed it in 1912. Theindex values vary between zero, when everyone has exactly the same income, and1, when one person has all of the income and everybody else has none. Inmid-1970s America, the index was 0.316, but it had reached 0.378 by the late2000s. One of the few nations to see its Gini value fall was Greece, which wentfrom 0.413 in the 1970s to 0.307 in the late 2000s. So Greece seems to bereducing income inequality — but with little to buy, riotsin the streets and economic opportunity largelylimited to those partaking in corruption, the nation is hardly a model foranyone’s economy.