resources to promote equality, which acted as a positive-feedback loop to support the high rates of growth. Cambridge University Lecturer Gabriel Palma recently found no evidence for a 'Kuznets curve' in inequality: "[T]he statistical evidence for the 'upwards' side of the 'Inverted-U' between inequality and income per capita seems to have vanished, as many low and low-middle income countries now have a distribution of income similar to that of most middle-income countries (other than those of Latin America and Southern Africa). That is, half of Sub-Saharan Africa and many countries in Asian, including India, China and Vietnam, now have an income distribution similar to that found in North Africa, the Caribbean and the second-tier NICs. And this level is also similar to that of half of the first-tier NICs, the Mediterranean EU and the Anglophone OECD (excluding the US). As a result, about 80% of the world population now live in countries with a Gini around 40." Palma goes on to note that, among middle-income countries, only those in Latin America and Southern Africa live in an inequality league of their own. Instead of a Kuznets curve, he breaks the population into deciles and examines the relationship between their respective incomes and income inequality. Palma then shows that there are two distributional trends taking place in inequality within a country: "One is 'centrifugal', and takes place at the two tails of the distribution—leading to an increased diversity across countries in the shares appropriated by the top 10 percent and bottom forty percent. The other is 'centripetal', and takes place in the middle—leading to a remarkable uniformity across countries in the share of income going to the half of the population located between deciles 5 to 9." Therefore, it is the share of the richest 10% of the population that affects the share of the poorest 40% of the population with the middle to upper-middle staying the same across all countries. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty denies the effectiveness of the Kuznets curve. He points out that in some rich countries, the level of income inequality in 21st century has exceeded that in the second decades of 20th century, proposing the explanation that when the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of economic growth over the long term, the result is the concentration of wealth. Kuznets's own caveats In a biography about Simon Kuznets's