"Even though inequality began to rise after 1980, it took economists a couple of decades to really notice. Among those who turned their attention to the fallout was Milanovic, who grew up in Communist Yugoslavia, spent a couple of decades in the research department of the World Bank, and now teaches economics at the City University of New York. Milanovic originally built his reputation in the late nineties, when, using a giant World Bank database of household incomes, he was able to demonstrate how the benefits of globalization had been distributed among different classes across various groups of countries. The big winners were the “global plutocrats,” whose returns on capital shot up, and the new mass middle class of the emerging world, mainly in East Asia and India, who benefitted from the spectacular growth of their regions. The big losers were Western middle-class workers whose incomes stagnated as the industries they worked in were hollowed out by foreign competition. Hence the visceral appeal of Donald Trump’s protectionist measures against China."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/the-rich-cant-get-richer-forever-can-they