Setting the study around 150 CE landed it in what was by far one of the better periods in Roman history. It was around the middle of the period of the Five Good Emperors, during the rule of the one of those who was probably the most benign by a long shot, and was a period of (comparative) peace and (not comparative) stability when placed alongside pretty much any time before or since in the empire.
Basically, Antoninus Pius' reign was about as good as it would get in Rome for the average (or below-average, or above-average) Roman; if someone put a gun to my head and told me I had to pick a time in Roman history in which to live, I'd be aiming somewhere between 120 and 180. Later Romans, and people in the medieval and Renaissance eras who still had access to the histories, would look on that time more or less as a golden age.
Now, that said, the study's still kind of horrifying - a post-industrial society simply should not be comparable economically to a pre-industrial society, full stop. Not even the high points of a pre-industrial society. If you've got to have Roman-era inequality issues, that's the time period you've got to pick. But it still has the little problem that inequality levels are approaching that of ancient monarchies, which is a wee bit problematic, not least because to get to that point you've got to be going quite a ways downhill in the first place. It's somewhere between difficult and impossible to stretch things much further in a modern society without things falling apart dramatically, or otherwise altering the society to, well, get closer to the one it's being compared to in the first place.
So yeah, I definitely think it's a Terrible Thing that the comparison can even be made. At the same time, if you went a century before, the emperors had more wealth, personally, than the rest of the population of the empire combined twice over. (Picture the US' GDP being what it is, but the president personally being worth $9.5 trillion of that with the remainder going to the rest of us.) If you went a century later, you'd wind up in the period of the Barracks Emperors, which would make the (surviving) ancient Romans pine for pretty much any other time that Caligula wasn't in office.
Basically, it's not quite as bad as the headline, or the reactions in this thread imply. There was a whole lot of Rome in ancient Rome, and conditions varied hugely over the generations. But, as I said, the fact that there's even room for that kind of comparison to be made in the first place is pretty upsetting.
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