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It may be all you need to look at if your goal is merely to scoff at the state of affairs and reaffirm your egalitarian self-identity. If you want to thoroughl

It may be all you need to look at if your goal is merely to scoff at the state of affairs and reaffirm your egalitarian self-identity. If you want to thoroughly understand the problem so that you can reason intelligently about what a solution might look like, you'll probably want more data.

nickthemagicman 9y ago
How can that be interpreted in a positive light to have all of the economic gains of a country going to a small few?
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  Because "income" does not equal "all of the economic gains of a country." Lots of other things happened in the period in that graph which kept median incomes lower despite economic improvements taking place. Like: 1. The offering of health insurance as a tax-free employment benefit. 2. An increase in divorce rates (households all over cut in half but the median household income didn't drop; there must have been an economic gain distributed to not-rich people for this to happen). Also, this graph doesn’t say anything about what happened to the size of each of these groups. Pretty sure the biggest trend in America has been the middle class splitting in half between people making more money (and thus becoming part of the "small few") and people making less (which worsens income inequality even though more people are now "rich"). So yeah, there's a lot missing from these graphs.
  - nickthemagicman 9y ago
    The goal of the graph is to generalize large scale income distributions/gains on a large sample size of hundreds of millions of people. Not to go into every single micro sub group of income earners and divorced neurologists with company sponsored health insurance who have more income than an tech worker homeowner with 6 cats. The graph is perfectly valid for what it represents. The share on a large sample size of hundreds of millions of people of historical income gains and results can be interpreted thusly.

nickthemagicman 9y ago

How can that be interpreted in a positive light to have all of the economic gains of a country going to a small few?

thehardsphere 9y ago
Because "income" does not equal "all of the economic gains of a country." Lots of other things happened in the period in that graph which kept median incomes lower despite economic improvements taking place. Like: 1. The offering of health insurance as a tax-free employment benefit. 2. An increase in divorce rates (households all over cut in half but the median household income didn't drop; there must have been an economic gain distributed to not-rich people for this to happen). Also, this graph doesn’t say anything about what happened to the size of each of these groups. Pretty sure the biggest trend in America has been the middle class splitting in half between people making more money (and thus becoming part of the "small few") and people making less (which worsens income inequality even though more people are now "rich"). So yeah, there's a lot missing from these graphs.
- nickthemagicman 9y ago
  The goal of the graph is to generalize large scale income distributions/gains on a large sample size of hundreds of millions of people. Not to go into every single micro sub group of income earners and divorced neurologists with company sponsored health insurance who have more income than an tech worker homeowner with 6 cats. The graph is perfectly valid for what it represents. The share on a large sample size of hundreds of millions of people of historical income gains and results can be interpreted thusly.