Driven by a rising China and India, this century has seen a stunning decrease in global inequality — bringing it down to levels not seen since the 1870s.

• That's the conclusion by Branko Milanovic, one of the world's foremost inequality researchers, Axios chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon writes from an important essay by Milanovic in Foreign Affairs.

Why it matters: The U.S. has only about 4% of the world's population. Increasing equality is good for the planet, but foreshadows a waning of U.S. hegemony.

🧮 By the numbers: Inequality is measured using the Gini coefficient, which runs on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (where one person would have all of the world's income).

• On that scale, inequality fell from 69 in 2000 to 60 in 2018 — and is almost certainly even lower today. That means the world looks more equal than at any point since about 1875.

🇨🇳 What's happening: In 2018, for every 100 Americans earning more than the median U.S. income, about 25 Chinese people earned that much. Within the next 20-30 years, the number of Chinese people earning more than the U.S. median will reach, then surpass the number of Americans.

• 🇮🇳 But it's not just China getting richer. "In the 1970s, India's share of global GDP was less than three percent, whereas that of Germany, a major industrial power, was seven percent," notes Milanovic. "By 2021, those proportions had been swapped."

Go deeper: Read the Foreign Affairs essay ... Share this story.

Former President Trump seized on yesterday's historic court appearance in Miami to bash foes and conduct a highly choreographed, multi-city campaign swing.

• Why it matters: For Trump's arraignment on 37 counts in the classified-documents case, his team orchestrated his most aggressive day of the 2024 campaign so far — and signaled his stance if, as expected, he faces future legal bombshells, Axios' Sophia Cai reports.

Moments after Trump pleaded not guilty, Donald Trump Jr. sent out a fundraising email for the campaign blaring: "My father has been ARRAIGNED."

• While Trump was still in the Miami courthouse, one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, read a statement to reporters outside: "The people in charge of this country do not love America."
• On Fox News and Newsmax, Habba went from show to show, accusing the federal government of acting like dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela.

🥊 Reality check: The charges could bring serious prison time.

After the arraignment, Trump's caravan stopped at Versailles, an iconic Cuban restaurant in Miami (above).

• With cameras rolling, Trump met an MMA fighter. Supporters sang "Happy Birthday" (Trump turns 77 today), and prayed for the twice-indicted former president.

Moments after Trump's visit to Versailles, his aides splashed scenes from the restaurant all over Twitter.

• Trump aides documented Trump's day on social media, basked in the wall-to-wall coverage on major networks — and promoted a Tucker Carlson defense of Trump that aired on Twitter late Tuesday.

Trump ended the day with a speech before supporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — taken live on Fox News and Newsmax, but not on CNN or MSNBC.

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Check the chyron above, which ended Fox News' 8 p.m. ET hour.

• 🤔 Host Brian Kilmeade said as the show went live to an appearance by former President Trump at his club in Bedminster, N.J.: "This is the president of the United States, about to address a crowd of reporters."

🥚 The government index that tracks egg prices fell 13.8% in May — the largest monthly drop since January 1951, according to Consumer Price Index data out yesterday.

• Axios Markets' Emily Peck says she's ready to ... get crackin' ... on all sorts of custardy recipes.

⛽ Gas prices dropped roughly 20% over the past 12 months.

• Explore the data.

Banks and retail are the business sectors first in line for the biggest boost from generative AI, Axios global tech correspondent Ryan Heath writes from a McKinsey report out yesterday.

• 75% of productivity gains from generative AI will come from just four business functions: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering and R&D, the report says.

Why it matters: The higher the pay and education associated with a work function, the more susceptible it will be to AI's impact, according to McKinsey.

The findings: McKinsey — which studied 63 practical uses of generative AI across 2,100 existing work activities — expects activities that consume about two-thirds of our work time today to be automated over the next 20 years.

• A key example is R&D, where the emerging field of generative design — turbocharged by foundation models that enable faster drafting and testing of products and services — will provide big efficiencies.

🧮 By the numbers: Generative AI could add up to $4.4 trillion a year to the global economy — a sum greater than the GDP of Germany.

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Wells Fargo and the Latino civil rights group UnidosUS are unveiling a multimillion-dollar plan to help 4 million Latinos buy homes by 2030, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.

• Both will announce today that they are kicking in $10 million each as part of a $100 million fundraising effort aimed at changing federal and local policies to make loans more accessible, and provide counseling for Latinos seeking to become homeowners.

🖼️ The big picture: The homeownership rate among Latinos reached 49.7% in the first quarter of 2023 — but is about 25 percentage points lower than non-Hispanic white Americans.

• Advocates say that low rate is a warning sign for the nation's financial future, since the Latino population in the U.S. is projected to grow by 12 million every decade until 2060.

🔬 Zoom in: The $20 million kickstart funding will launch an initiative called HOME (Home Ownership Means Equity) to tackle the challenges many Latinos face in buying homes, UnidosUS and Wells Fargo will announce.

• The program will push new lending rules, and increased housing density through zoning reforms.

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Cormac McCarthy — whose nihilistic, violent tales of the American frontier and post-apocalyptic worlds led to awards, movie adaptations and sleepless nights for enthralled and appalled readers — died at 89 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M.

• Why he matters: McCarthy was arguably the greatest American writer since Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner, each of whom he was compared to, Reuters reports.

The reclusive McCarthy wrote with a distinctive, spare style that eschewed grammatical norms but drew the reader in relentlessly to his world of blood, dust and an unforgiving universe.

• Little known for the first 60 or so years of his life, rapturous reviews of 1992's "All the Pretty Horses" — the first in "The Border Trilogy" — changed all that. The book was made into a movie — as were 2005's "No Country for Old Men" and 2006's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Road."
• He told Oprah Winfrey in a rare interview, in 2007: "I don't think [interviews] are good for your head. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn't be thinking about it, you probably should be doing it."

💭 "People ask me, 'Why are you interested in physics?"' he said in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile.

• "But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity. I just don’t get it.

Read an excerpt of "The Road."

AI has been used to extract John Lennon's voice from an old demo to create "the last Beatles record" decades after the band broke up, Sir Paul McCartney, 80, told the BBC yesterday.

• McCartney said the technology was used to separate the Beatles' voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson's 2021 documentary series, "The Beatles: Get Back."
• The "new" song is set to be released later this year, he said (via AP).

Jackson was "able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano," McCartney said. "He could separate them with AI. He'd tell the machine: 'That's a voice, this is a guitar. Lose the guitar.'"

• "So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on," he added. "We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do."

The BBC said the demo was likely an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon, "Now and Then."

• 🎧 Listen to McCartney's 30-min interview.