According to a famous conjecture by the economist Simon Kuznets, as countries get richer they should get less equal, because some people leave farming for higher-paying lines of work while the rest stay in rural squalor. But eventually a rising tide lifts all the boats. As more of the population gets swept into the modern economy, inequality should decline, tracing out an inverted U. This hypothetical arc of inequality over time is called the Kuznets curve.
