Inequality in America is today equivalent to that of Ancient Rome during slavery.

That statistic came roaring off the page at me yesterday. You’ll find it in Dr Samuel Miller McDonald’s new book Progress. The Oxford scholar argues that the concept of ‘progress’ is a con-trick played on us by the rich. The arc of history has mostly bent towards the wealthy accumulating evermore wealth.

The rich get rich, and the poor get poorer, as the old song from the Great Depression goes. Approximately 3000 billionaires worldwide collectively increased their wealth by $6.5trillion since 2015, bringing their total worth to 14.6% of global GDP.

McDonald’s work should be read alongside another new book, Goliath’s Curse by Dr Luke Kemp from Cambridge University. The ‘Goliath' in Kemp’s study of civilisational collapse is the elite - the rich who have ruled over us since the Bronze Age.

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His thesis is that societies collapse due to the annexing of wealth by a tiny elite who he calls “walking versions of the Dark Triad”. The Dark Triad is a psychological term for the worst of humanity’s characteristics: narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy.

Taken together these books warn: things fall apart when the rich get too rich, and we’re living through a moment when the rich have definitely got too rich.

That disparity in wealth - the figure which marks America as unequal as Caesar’s Rome - has a technical term: the Gini Coefficient. Not much separates Britain and America on this measure. Among the list of 37 OECD countries, Britain is 30th; America 32nd. Costa Rica comes last.

The wider a society’s Gini coefficient, the greater........

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