There’s something odd about the argument over economic inequality that broke out across factions of the center-left and among opinion journalists at the end of last year. One faction argued that liberals should embrace populist language about inequality. Others cautioned against it, either because they thought it was strategically unwise, or factually inaccurate. But everyone involved seemed disturbed by one dimension or another.

And perhaps that’s the real reason to move on from talking about inequality: it’s not that it’s anything less than “the defining challenge of our time,” as President Obama put it in a speech in December. Rather, it’s too defining, too large. It’s a concept too sweeping and cluttered to lead to useful solutions. Economic inequality encompasses not only the gains of the very wealthy, but also the relatively modest gains of the merely well-off, the stagnation of the middle and working class, and the deepening, multi-generational struggle of the urban and rural poor. And that’s just inequality of income. Inequality of wealth—assets and debt—may matter even more, because even small amounts of wealth can ensure both economic security and economic opportunity. Wealth inequality goes even deeper and cuts more sharply along racial and generational lines.

Then there are the secondary aspects of economic inequality: lack of economic mobility, or downward mobility. Declining economic security, and the shift of financial risks onto families that can least handle it. The likelihood that the recession has created a large class of people who may never work again. Increasing dependence on public programs among working families. And the deepening influence of economic inequality on the political sphere, which in turn reinforces the rules that reward the winners and reduce opportunity and dynamism in the economy.

Inequality is a concept too sweeping and cluttered to lead to useful solutions.

Almost everyone, even conservatives, is alarmed by at least some dimensions of this. Scott Winship, an inequality skeptic who recently moved from the liberal Brookings Institution to the more welcoming, conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, argues statistically that we should focus on the poor over the middle class and declare “war on immobility.” New York Times columnist Bill Keller, and even Senator Marco Rubio, are also alarmed by the waning of economic mobility. Ezra Klein (who ignited much of the fight with a provocation titled “Inequality Isn’t ‘The Defining Challenge of Our Time’”) is concerned about unemployment and the nexus of political and economic inequality; conservatives such as Charles Murray are concerned about the increasing “dependence” of the white working class. While it’s theoretically possible to separate these outcomes from pure income inequality, and ask whether inequality is a cause of immobility, this is an unnecessary exercise. None of these are alternatives to inequality; they are themselves aspects of the single big story of this economic era.

Those who embrace the label “populist” tend to highlight the staggering gains of the top 1 percent compared to “the 99 percent.” The solutions that follow from a focus on the top include significantly higher marginal tax rates, such as those proposed by the great inequality scholars Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez, or tighter regulation of Wall Street and CEO pay. But those policies alone wouldn’t improve the lives of the 99 percent, a group that ranges from the destitute to the very comfortably upper-upper middle-class. The next argument is over whether to focus on the poorest 40 percent, a traditional approach that doesn’t threaten the wealthy; or to focus on deep structural changes that would promote full employment and raise wages in the middle. Even then, dozens of questions follow, related to the effects of education or the bargaining power of workers in the absence of a strong labor movement.