Some other charts to explore this stuff. But man, economic statistics are hard - a lot of the fine print can really affect the results (household vs individual income, labor force participation, etc):<p>Filter by years to see growth: <a href="http://stateofworkingamerica.org/who-gains/#/?start=1995&end=2008" rel="nofollow">http://stateofworkingamerica.org/who-gains/#/?start=1995&end...</a><p>Job growth by job type: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/05/upshot/how-the-recession-reshaped-the-economy-in-255-charts.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/05/upshot/how-the...</a><p>Income by demographic: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinking-middle-class.html?ref=business" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinki...</a><p>Percentile income distribution: <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/07/01/the-99-got-a-raise-last-year-but-not-enough-to-dent-rising-inequality/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/07/01/the-99-got-a-raise...</a>
"In addition to wages, the census includes dividends, rental income and cash benefits (like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and unemployment benefits). But it excludes noncash benefits like food stamps (which benefit the poor) and capital gains (which tend to benefit the rich)."<p>This is really a strange way to look at it. It is comparing the 'rich' middle class to the rest of the middle class and ignoring the extremes.<p>Whenever a great profit is being made, basic theory says that the market should work to push things back to normal. When that doesn't happen it is an indicator that something is off-kilter.<p>So, what is off-kilter here? What occupations are at the tip of the elephant's trunk? Why aren't the people riding the elephant's back pushing into that part of the market? Is it an education problem? A capital allocation problem? Regulatory capture? This is the question that needs answering.
If the per capita GDP of U.S. grew by 12.4%, how it happened that all classes of society were worse off in 2014 than in 2000? I don't trust that chart at all.
I find these type of posts on HN to be curious things. Clearly, there's lots of interest in the subject and desire to change things. And, most HN readers are highly educated and many are even high-income (i.e. have position to affect real change). But, I never see posts advertising ways to take real action.<p>I love you guys, but making your cohorts know that you're aware and sympathetic of the cause only feels good. Let's see some posts that help organize and activate. Let's set some achievable, tangible goals and do something.
Income inequality will continue to grow as technology lets us produce tremendous amounts of value with comparably small amounts of employees. Said value is often not accounted for in graphs like these so we can't really know if people are better off today than 20 years ago. I mean, would you rather live today with cheap internet, awesome computer and more free content on the internet than you can ever consume or would you want to live without those things with 10% higher inflation adjusted wage 20 years ago? I know what I would choose, hence I would say that the middle class has gained a lot.<p>The nice things about those things is that they are wealth agnostic as well. Bill Gates doesn't have better internet than me, nor does he have a better personal computer, better youtube, better facebook, better internet search etc. All of those are extremely valuable and are spread evenly between almost everyone in the west.
"In North Dakota, in the heart of shale mining country, it made everyone richer."<p>Well, mostly on the western side of the state, but that was the poorer side to begin with. It did make for some problems with some folks on fixed incomes.
Well, the glass half full is that California's drought will soon be fixed by the tears of everyone in SV who's upset that, despite all their, intelligence, big data and economic prodding by the government, the middle class in those "backwards, flyover states" did better.<p>On a more serious note, the pattern I saw here was coastline = bad.
Can we talk about what a fucking terrible visualization the elephant chart is? We often note how useless "fastest growing" is, because it is easy to get large changes when you have a small denominator. So income can grow worldwide for the bottom by 100% and only add a few dollars to their wealth. Meanwhile the top 1℅ might add 25% to their income at millions of dollars.<p>This is a chart designed to make us feel good about poor people getting a pittance. Meanwhile the top 100 people in the world have more wealth than the bottom fifty percent. We need growth of tens of thousands of percent at the bottom for decades to move forward.
Rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. This is ultimately the goal of the modern capitalist system.<p>We can talk all we want but we are all disposable material, unless we own the business we work for.<p>How many people in this country ( middle class included) are 3-6 months away from being on the street if job suddenly disappeared?