"Occupy Wall Street and the very idea of the “one percent” emerged just after the financial crisis plunged much of the world into recession, and US and British banks were handed billion-dollar bailouts to steady the ship.
The anger didn’t come from the fact that bankers were so well paid. It came from the perception that they’d made that money by piling up risk rather than being particularly clever or hard-working – risk that was now being underwritten by the taxpayer. The wealth wasn’t just distributed unequally, but unfairly. The market mechanisms that most people accepted as the rules of the economic game suddenly seemed rigged.
It’s been the same in the years since. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump didn’t get as far as they did by quoting GINI coefficients and pay ratios. It was the picture they painted of a system which rewarded the wrong things, in which hard work didn’t pay off and the ropes and pulleys of social mobility were frayed or outright broken."
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