First, we will not deal with issues

First, we will not deal with issues of mobility but instead focus on repeated crosssections of data.10 A distribution where individuals constantly move in and out of the top (or bottom) of the distribution and where an individual’s position 1 year says nothing of his or her position the next year is clearly very different to one where every individual keeps his or her place over time. Reality is obviously characterized by something in between the two extremes, but importantly the few studies that have been able to directly address this question (or aspects of it) conclude that trends in cross-sectional data are not driven by changes in mobility and do capture actual inequality.11 In short, even if repeated cross sections of inequality, in theory, could be misleading when discussing changes in inequality over time, this does not seem to be the case in practice.