Hillary Clinton reportedly commented during a meeting with economists that the US needed a “toppling” of the 1%. The comments were said to have come when the Democratic presidential candidate saw a chart of changes in real income.
Looking beyond just the real incomes of the 1%, several other measures show that inequality in the US has been rising for the past few decades.
We put together a dozen charts and maps that show some of the core issues of inequality.
The Gini index is a standard measure of inequality, ranging from 0 to 1. The index measures how far away the income distribution in a population is from a completely egalitarian distribution. An index of 0 corresponds to a distribution in which everyone has the same income, and an index of 1 is a distribution in which one person gets all the income and everyone else gets nothing. The Gini index has steadily risen in the US since the late 1960s.
Gini indexes in metropolitan areas and areas around midsize towns range from a fairly egalitarian 0.36 in Juneau, Alaska, to a highly unequal 0.55 in Ruston, Louisiana. Business Insider compiled a list of the most unequal large metro areas based on US Census data.
Among OECD countries, only Chile, Mexico, and Turkey have more inequality by this measure.
According to a 2013 paper by Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, at the start of the century through the roaring ’20s, the top of the heap got an outsize share of income. After the New Deal and World War II, that share dropped precipitously in a period often referred to as the “Great Compression.” From the early 1980s to the present, the share of those with the highest income has started to skyrocket back to where it was at the start of the 20th century.
The top 1% is responsible for most of the top decile’s gains, while the rest of the top 10% saw much more modest increases.
The top ten-thousandth of earners — the top 1% of the 1% — took in about 5.4% of total income in 2012.
The wealth share of the top 0.1% has more than doubled since the 1980s, according to a recent study based on estimating wealth from income tax returns done by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
People in the bottom 90% frequently don’t have enough extra income to keep saving. As Business Insider’s Shane Ferro put it: “People need somewhere to live, and they have to keep up with increasing tuition if they want to go to college. Necessary fixed costs increased while incomes stagnated, so saving gave way to debt in order for people to maintain the same lifestyle they had in previous decades.”
A 2010 survey showed that both Americans’ ideal and estimated wealth distributions were far more equitable than the actual wealth distribution.
This chart, based on data from the Equality of Opportunity Project, shows that the higher up on the income ladder a parent is, the more likely their child will end up in the top part of the income distribution. A child whose parents are already in the top fifth is more than three times as likely to stay at the top as a child from the bottom fifth is to get there.
This map shows a measure of intergenerational social mobility from the Harvard Equality of Opportunity Project. “Absolute Mobility” describes where an average child starting in the middle of the bottom half of the income distribution will end up in the income rankings as an adult. Counties on the map with lighter shading have more intergenerational mobility; counties with darker shading have more children ending up in the same part of the income distribution as their parents.
This article is published in collaboration with Business Insider. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
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Author: Andy Kiersz is a quant reporter at Business Insider.
Image: A woman holds a cluster of U.S. flags during a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services naturalization ceremony in Oakland. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith.
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