Daily Wisdom: Growing US Inequality

The debate about the growth in income inequality in the United States was framed by Occupy Wall Street as the gap between the top 1% and the 99% of Americans in the majority. New research shows that the share at of the wealth has increasingly been concentrated in the hands of a much small group, “the plutocrats.”

Slate’s Jordan Weissman explains:

But they are basically in keeping with what has already been shown about income inequality. Occupy Wall Street trained Americans to frame the economic gap in terms of the 99 percent and 1 percent. But writers and economists have been pointing out for years that the biggest winners in today’s globalized, finance-heavy economy have been an even smaller band of super-rich. Tim Noah dubbed them “the stinking rich.”Chrystia Freeland went with “plutocrats.” No matter what you choose to name them, the largest economic gains have accrued to Americans at the very, very tiniest tip of the earnings pyramid. Here’s one dramatic illustration I’ve drawn from the World Top Incomes Database. The top 0.5 percent, with minimum household income of $551,000, have roughly tripled their share of the nation’s paycheck since 1978, to about 18 percent. The bottom half of the 1 percent, the work-a-day rich, have upped theirs only to around 4 percent.