Real title was, 'Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart'.<p>Despite some of the recent coverage, this chart indicates that gains are not going to the top 20%: they are going to top 1%, and particularly <1%.<p>To be clear, this is not many programmers:
"In 1980, the top 1% of adult earners in the U.S. made $420,000 a year, on average (before taxes and measured in 2014 dollars) — 27 times as much as the average for the bottom 50% of earners. Today the top 1% of earners make an average of $1.3 million a year — 81 times as much as the average for workers in the bottom half."<p>HBR also found that gains are increasingly going to the top firms: there is a global set of winners and losers. Inequality is growing everywhere, in all fields. <a href="https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/03/corporations-in-the-age-of-inequality" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/03/corporations-in-the-age-...</a>
When inequality grows, empires shrink and eventually disappear: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/05/inequality-leads-to-economic-collapse" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/05/inequality-...</a><p>And let's not kid ourselves. Those on top intend on staying there by growing the gap.
It looks to me that QE3 was a huge part of that later uptick.<p>its no surprise to me that if you juice the markets and inflate asset prices (mostly stock), that the richest benefit most. what was surprising to me is how bad actually making stuff did. I understand that juicing the markets might not benefit that, but it seemed as though QE3 actually hurt producing tangible things.
It is difficult for American workers to compete with Chinese or Indian people wages. The good thing is that the global inequality is declining.[0] My guess is that when the incomes in low-wage exporter countries get closer to the developed countries, then we may see a wage increase again.<p>[0] - <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality</a>
It's my understanding that there is some churn in the top 1% of earners. If the economy transitioned to a place where people had big spikes and dips in their annual income, couldn't the graph look the same? Doesn't that sound like a "gig economy"?<p>In other words, why graph income and not wealth?
Taxation should compensate for the fact that the top 0.1% of people have the means to pay specialists to optimize their financial gains.<p>This advantage has nothing to do with individual skill or hard working ethics. Taxation schemes that don't take this into account are simply unfair.
There is a cool economic / social principal called "Preferential Attachment" that helps describe this a bit.<p>From Wikipedia: "A preferential attachment process is any of a class of Citation dynamics processes in which some quantity, typically some form of wealth or credit, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects according to how much they already have, so that those who are already wealthy receive more than those who are not."<p>It's an interesting principle that plays out in economics as well as other situations where skill is involved. It is similar in some ways to the "80/20 rule" if you are familiar.<p>I would definitely recommend researching the topic a bit. It will definitely add some dynamics to your view of income inequality.
Poverty is a problem. But is inequality bad? It doesn't bother me that when billionaires have private jets and I don't. I'm not rich, but I can live comfortably, especially if you look at history. The average american has at least one air conditioned car. I'm sure that would make the pharaoh of ancient egypt jealous. He would call inequality on us.
"Most Americans would look at these charts and conclude that inequality is out of control. The president, on the other hand, seems to think that inequality isn’t big enough."<p>Would nobody else reading this want some further information to back up this statement? Its a shame it wasn't nearer the beginning of the article as I could have stopped reading earlier.