With his bestseller "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," Thomas Piketty sparked a fierce controversy over the growing inequality in Western societies and its causes. Now comes the "World Inequality Report" - the most thorough and up-to-date report on the state of global inequality. A young team of economists, including Piketty, presents facts and analyses that clearly show: Inequality is dramatically increasing almost everywhere in the world. In 1980, the bottom 50 percent of the income scale in the U.S. earned 21 percent of the total national income, while the top 1 percent took home 11 percent of the total income. However, this vast disparity has now even reversed: While the bottom 50 percent now take home only 13 percent of the income, the top 1 percent secures more than 20 percent.