american inequality in 6 charts

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/11/inequality-and-growth-what-do-we-know.htmlhttp://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/11/inequality-and-growth-what-do-we-know.html



***SNIP

’ll start with an updated chart from Emmanuel Saez, of Berkeley, which shows the share of pre-tax income enjoyed by the top one per cent of earners over the period from 1913 to 2012. The data, which comes from the Internal Revenue Service, is for market income: it includes realized capital gains but excludes government transfers.


***SNIP

How have the folks outside the one per cent been faring? A second chart from Saez tells us the answer. Going back a century, the light line shows the path of inflation-adjusted pre-tax incomes for families in the bottom ninety-nine per cent. The dark line shows how families in the top one per cent have been doing.


***SNIP

The third chart shows a measure of pre-tax inequality and inequality after taxes and transfers for twenty-two advanced countries. The measure used is a Gini coefficient, which captures inequality on a scale of zero to one, where zero is perfect equality (everybody receives the same income) and one is perfect inequality (the richest person gets all the income). The light lines on the bar chart show pre-tax inequality. The dark lines show inequality after taxes and transfers.


***SNIP

The next chart, which Harvard’s Raj Chetty put up, shows the results of one such exercise, which he and three other economists (including Saez) carried out. In addition to working out the probabilities of moving up the income distribution, the authors broke down the data on a geographical basis, which enables us to see where social mobility is highest and lowest. Areas with the least social mobility are depicted in darker colors.