> Well, if you take on a more global perspective: global inequality absolutely skyrocketed until the 1970s and has only gradually been climbing down since then.

Probably because pre-WW2 and globalization most people on the planet were equally poor.

> I'm sick of portraying the era until the 1970s as some kind of golden age. It was the nadir for most people on the globe in terms of equality, not the zenith.

The 1970s were mostly the zenith of recent technological advancement: certainly personal computing and the Internet came after, but there really hasn't been any major invention.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...

Post-1970s technology has become more equally distributed (à la Gibson), and that has been through globalization.