"Increasingly favoured" is a statement about mechanisms.

When you personally state it, or in general when it's stated by anyone?

Ok, those words could be used for either meaning -- to the confusion of discussion. T&D do say:

So examining times series, we can easily get a historical illusion of rise in wealth concentration when it has been there all along.

which could also be read in either sense. But the population centile and the mechanisms whereby people get rich are what they are. They are both real things, the divergence of which does not make either less real than the other.