In August this year Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman circulated a new working paper, “From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia, 1905-2016” (NPZ 2017a, b). This paper makes several advances, including a novel estimate of the evolution of Russians’ offshore wealth.

To situate the subject briefly, Cold War scholarship has left us a substantial literature on income inequality under communism. Bergson (1944), Yanowitch (1963), Wiles and Markowski (1971), Pryor (1972), Wiles (1974, 1975), Wädekin (1975), Chapman (1977), McAuley (1977), and Matthews (1978), each made valiant attempts, sometimes extending to piecemeal comparisons over countries and over time. “Considering the obscure data with which they had to work,” a survey by Schroeder (1983) remarked, “Western investigators display a large degree of agreement.” Measured by the decile ratio, the distribution of official incomes in the Soviet Union was becoming more equal over time and was substantially more equal than in the developed market economies then available as comparators. Schroeder noted, however, that Western researchers could not access data on the Soviet distribution of illegal incomes, or on privileged distribution of goods and services including accommodation and health care.

More recently, Lindert and Nafziger (2014) made an advance in another direction, examining inequality in Russia before and after the Soviet era. They concluded that pre-tax income inequality in 1997, although likely understated by official reports, was greater than in 1904.

Finally, a new paper by Allen and Khaustova (2017) examines Russian real wages in the long run. This paper does not address income inequality directly but allows inferences to be drawn from comparing real wages and productivity in industry. They find that real wages stagnated from the 1860s to 1913 (in St Petersburg, the capital, and Kursk, a provincial centre) or showed modest gains (in Moscow) but lagged everywhere behind productivity, suggesting a movement from wages to profits and income from wealth. After the troubled wartime and revolutionary period, the 1920s brought large real wage gains. These were short-lived, evaporating in the famine-led inflation of the early 1930s.

Novokmet and co-authors (NPZ) are the first to have tried to measure wealth and income inequality in Russia over the whole twentieth century. And, as many readers will be aware, their paper is part of a much larger collaborative project, the World Inequality Lab and the associated World Wealth and Income Database, one that aims to measure inequality in many countries over hundreds of years.

According to NPZ, the share of the top 10 per cent in pre-tax income distributed to adults in Russia was 47 per cent in 1905. The share fell to 22 per cent in 1928, increased modestly to 26 per cent by 1956, and began to fall gently back again, reached a low of 21 per cent in 1980. (The Soviet-era years observed are 1928, 1956, and then roughly every second, third, or fourth year to 1988, when annual observations begin.) By 1996 the top 10-per-cent share had returned to the 1905 level and remained in that vicinity through 2016. NPZ comment: “our benchmark estimates suggest that inequality levels in Tsarist and post-Soviet Russia are roughly comparable. Very top income shares seem if anything somewhat larger in post-Soviet Russia.”

Measured by the top 10-percent income share, Russia today appears in the World Inequality Lab database in the same inequality band as the United States and China. Income inequality is reported as greater in a few countries: Turkey, India, South Africa, and Brazil. All north and west European countries that are represented in the database are more equal than Russia. But all are smaller than Russia in population, and a larger population will always tend to show greater inequality, because unequal economic outcomes are promoted by heterogeneity of all kinds, and heterogeneity is inevitably increasing in population size.

In its time the Soviet Union, in contrast, was apparently one of the most equal countries in the world. This is particularly striking, considering the large size of the Soviet population, 288 million by 1991. Other countries in the WID dataset with top 10-percent shares of 26 per cent or below at any time from 1917 to 1991 are few, and they are also much smaller in population: Australia, Denmark, Mauritius, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Taiwan. Of all these countries, only Italy’s population had reached 57 million by 1991, and Taiwan’s 20 million.

These results are broadly consistent with the earlier research described above. They confirm that income inequality in Russia after the Soviet era was comparable to before the Revolution, if not greater; that the distribution of Soviet official incomes was markedly more equal than in most market economies at the time and today, and in Russia beforehand and today; and that, within the Soviet era, inequality followed a modest Kuznets curve, rising, then falling.

Seen in this light, Soviet institutions and policies appear distinctly pro-poor. Before we take that as settled, however, there are three issues that point the other way.

First, in the Soviet era the poor might have gained relatively, but the chief factor in this was impoverishment of the rich. What the rich lost was not transferred to the poor, or was given only temporarily before the state grabbed it back, as clearly implied by Allen and Khaustova (2017). NPZ measure inequality by shares of income distributed to adults. In the Soviet era, the share of income not distributed to adults, but retained by the state, became unusually large. As a first approximation, household consumption fell from around 80 per cent of GDP in 1913 to around 50 per cent in 1940 and through the postwar period. By implication, what the rich lost was diverted into government administration and investment and defence projects; it was not passed on to the lower income strata. If there was an initial transfer to the poor, it was confined to the 1920s, and was then cancelled in the Great Breakthrough of Stalinist collectivization and industrialization.

Second, the Soviet state did not take only from the rich. It took also from the poor, including the poorest. This applied particularly in the years from 1928 to 1956, a period for which the NPZ dataset has only gaps. While I cannot find full explanation on this point, the NPZ dataset (like most Cold-War scholarship) seems to rely on reports of the distribution of official wage earnings to capture Soviet-era inequality. Wage earnings accounted for less than one third of Soviet household incomes in 1928, just over 60 per cent in 1937, and nearly 70 per cent in 1956 (Kashin and Mikov 2004: 17, 23, 34). The largest category of households excluded from reports of wage earnings were collective farmers – the great majority of Soviet farm workers – who received an uncertain dividend, not a wage. If that is the case here, then the rural poor are left out of account. (Forced labourers are also left out. There were millions of these from the 1930s to the 1950s. But they are a small omission compared with many tens of millions of collective farmers.)

Narrative accounts of rural food shortages and periodic famines indicate that rural poverty contributed substantially to Soviet-era inequality before the 1950s (e.g. Davies and Wheatcroft 2004). After that time, the compensation of collective farmers moved gradually, but never completely, towards public-sector standards.

Finally, as NPZ acknowledge, under Soviet arrangements, persistent shortages and privileged distribution decoupled consumption inequality from income inequality. In the Soviet Union everyone had an income, but not everyone could spend it on the same terms. A privileged class of insiders – the party elite and the employees of key production and service establishments – who had access to relatively high-quality goods and services at prices fixed below the market-clearing level without waiting. Others had limited access to staple goods and services, for which they either waited in line or paid a higher, sometimes illegal price. As long as the poor had money they could not spend, or faced higher prices to spend it, it is possible and even likely that consumption was distributed more unequally than income. This contrasts with the pattern that has been found to prevail in market economies, where consumption inequality is generally less than income inequality. But comprehensive data on Soviet consumption inequality would seem far more difficult to come by than income data, so this may well remain a conjecture.

Consumption inequality was important not only for ex post evaluation of economic welfare under Soviet arrangements. It was of central importance to the political economy of the time. During the 1930s, as Paul Gregory (2004: 76-109) has noted, Stalin received regular reports of discontent and falling effort among the workers in the provinces and intervened from time to time to improve their condition. When he did so, he did not order their wages to be raised because, in a supply-constrained economy, this would only have lengthened local queues. Rather, he ordered consumer goods in short supply to be redirected to the towns and factories where dissatisfaction was rising, so that the workers could more easily spend their wages.

The existence of unofficial incomes in the Soviet era only adds complexity to the problem. We guess that unofficial incomes were substantial but of time-varying size. Anecdotes on who received them are plentiful. The Soviet central bank compiled annual estimates of their aggregate size (Kashin and Mikov 2004), but we continue to lack (and may never find) data on their distribution. Thus, it is impossible to say whether their net effect was to increase or reduce the extent of inequality of different kinds.

To summarize, the extent to which Soviet institutions favoured the poorest in society is easily overstated. The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution was to flatten the distribution of wages. On that official measure income inequality fell sharply. But non-wage earnings were likely distributed more unequally than wages. Unofficial incomes also mattered; how they mattered is unclear. Consumption inequality mattered too, and arguably mattered more than income inequality. Most likely, consumption inequality did not fall to the same extent. Whereas consumption inequality in market economies is relatively stable, it is possible that Soviet consumption inequality was volatile, spiking in particular years of crisis.

Any judgement on new work must be preliminary, but my thoughts so far are as follows. NPZ (2017) is a substantial contribution. It is not the first word on the subject, and it will not be the last word either. It turns a new page and sets a new challenge.

Hope you liked hearing about my experiences, not sure if you can tell in the video but it’s quite a hard thing for me to talk about. It was quite a big step for me to go abroad by myself for the first time and this experience was really stressful for me.

I’d really like to stress that everyone else on the course had a great time at their homestay, it was a really valuable experience for the people I spoke to – some of them are even going back to visit their homestay family this year! Nowadays I’m not at all mad at the family, although the way they treated me seemed quite harsh, it could be due to cultural differences – I’m sorry for causing them any inconvenience/upset (they probably complain about the English girl they had to kick out too, it wasn’t the homestay either of us wanted and that is sad). The most upsetting part for me was my treatment from the man from the homestay company. I was really taken aback, every Japanese person I’d spoken to so far was so polite and this man was so horrible to me! It was really shocking to be called a ‘horrible young lady’ when all I’d done was had an allergic reaction! I thought he’d be more understanding, but what can you do!

Although it did knock my confidence a bit, it didn’t ruin my whole trip. I still had a really lovely time in Japan, it’s a really beautiful country and I really enjoy the learning the language.

Iron Man 3 is the summer’s biggest box office hit… and miss. Strap in for two hours of Pepper Potts kicking more ass than Tony Stark.

If a mosquito bit Steven Spielberg around the time he was making “Jurassic Park,” then became trapped in amber until some nut with more money than forethought extracted the DNA from it and cloned an early ’90s version of Spielberg, well, that’s the guy I could see directing “Ready Player One.”

But for the actual Spielberg, now 71, to be able to tap into his boy-genius mojo after the likes of “Schindler’s List,” “Amistad” and “Munich” to deliver such a rousing technical achievement while incorporating the broken families and outsiders of some of his best-loved works is nothing short of phenomenal.

Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the script with Zak Penn (“The Incredible Hulk”), “Ready Player One” is centered around young Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, “X-Men: Apocalypse”). An orphan living with his aunt and her latest loser boyfriend in the Stacks, a series of mobile homes literally stacked like makeshift high-rises in Columbus, Ohio, Wade finds refuge in the virtual universe known as the OASIS.

It’s 2045, years after the corn syrup droughts and the bandwidth riots, and almost everyone, regardless of their income, practically lives inside the OASIS. And why wouldn’t they when they can do literally anything Spielberg and Warner Bros. could obtain the rights to, including climbing Mount Everest with Batman?

Inside the OASIS, Wade is known by his avatar Parzival. In real life, he’s never even met his best friend, whose avatar, Aech, is a massive, beastly mechanic. They’re mostly content to drive in street races for coins and a chance to unlock the first piece of the puzzle that the late OASIS designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance) left as a Willy Wonka-style inheritance. Whoever finds the three keys and the Easter egg hidden somewhere in the OASIS will control the virtual world as well as Halliday’s vast fortune.

It’s been five years since Halliday died, and no one has even cracked the first clue. Warner Bros. could sponsor a similar contest, asking moviegoers to spot all the pop-culture references in “Ready Player One” and it would prove nearly as difficult. (To give you a hint without ruining any of the surprises, the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” and the Iron Giant are on the movie’s poster.)

But after Parzival saves Art3mis (Olivia Cooke, “Bates Motel”), who resembles a sexy, anime porcupine, during a race, he starts to take the contest much more seriously. They’re determined to keep the OASIS in the hands of Gunters (egg hunters) like themselves and Aech and away from the Sixers, debtors who’ve been co-opted into hunting for the egg by Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, “Bloodline”), the nefarious head of Innovative Online Industries.

They’ll also have to survive the bounty hunter known as i-R0k, who shares the voice and, most hilariously, the attitude of T.J. Miller (“Silicon Valley”) and looks like Skeletor ate another Skeletor and then coughed up a RoboCop.

The virtual world of the OASIS looks nearly as magical on screen as it must to the millions of its goggled users. To emphasize the contrast, Spielberg created the OASIS scenes digitally using computer animation and motion-capture technology and shot the real-world moments on film. The effect is like bouncing back and forth between the Technicolor wonderland of Oz and the drab black-and-white Kansas.

“Ready Player One” goes on a bit too long, and several of the non-OASIS scenes tend to drag. Moviegoers who aren’t obsessed with video games or didn’t come of age with Buckaroo Banzai may be left scratching their heads during the onslaught of pop-culture references that come across in various avatars. Many of them stem from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the era with which Halliday, whom Rylance portrays as Bill Gates by way of an aging Garth Algar from “Wayne’s World,” identifies.

It’s tough to tell whether the Gunters are obsessed with that era because they’re obsessed with Halliday, or if they’re simply immersing themselves in the nostalgia to give them an edge in the contest.

Regardless of their intent, “Ready Player One’s” massive battle scene with trademarks colliding like rarely before, has taken an early lead for biggest geek-out of the year. It’s like “The Lego Movie,” only with more heart — and more joyous thrills, depending on how well you know your movie, music and video game history.

Just like Halliday’s contest, “Ready Player One” is designed to reward the nerdiest among us.

Devastating images of the Halifax Explosion, a cataclysm so great that some victims were blinded simply by looking at it.

“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode.”

These were the last words of Vince Coleman, the train dispatcher who met his end on December 6, 1917, in the Halifax Explosion. Seconds later, the ship would explode and set off the 3,000 tons of explosives inside. It would be the biggest and most devastating explosion in history until the invention of the nuclear bomb.

The Halifax Explosion started when two ships collided in the harbor of the Nova Scotian capital of Halifax. A Norwegian ship, the SS Imo, had slammed into the SS Mont-Blanc, a French ship filled to the brim with TNT, picric acid, benezole, and guncotton.

The collision cracked open the barrel of benezole, dousing the ship in flammable chemicals. Then the SS Imo’s engine kicked in, setting off a spark that would kill thousands.

All 3,000 tons of explosives then went off at once, burning with a heat of more than 9,000 °F. In seconds, the flames eviscerated every building in a half-mile radius, while a brutal shockwave tore through the rest of the city, traveling more than half a mile per second and shaking the city to its bones.

The inferno tore through Halifax, burning so bright that some were blinded just from looking at the light of the explosion. Others were trapped inside their homes by the roaring fires around them. They had no way to escape from the smoke that slowly choked them and the flames that left nothing but ashes in their wake.

“The sight was awful,” one witness said. “People hanging out of windows dead. Some with their heads missing, and some thrown onto the overhead telegraph wires.”

By the end, the Halifax Explosion had ended 2,000 lives and seriously injured at least 9,000 more.

As horrible as it was, though, it would have been worse if it wasn’t for that one final message from Vince Coleman. He stayed at his post to make sure the train bound for the harbor wouldn’t come in. He gave up his chance for one last mad dash for survival to save the lives of the 300 people on board that train.

“Guess this will be my last message,” Coleman said as he watched the flames burn through the hull of the SS Mont-Blanc. “Good-bye boys.”