The Great Divergence In Pictures: A visual guide to income inequality. [Slate]

“Maybe I don’t get it but don’t we want the blue and green portions of
the Income Share chart to get larger?”   
You seem to be confused. The charts show the changes in degree of income inequality across time. Larger blue and green areas represent greater income inequality. Most people want to lessen the disparity.

“Don’t we want the segment of
larger earners to grow?  Instead, are you suggesting that you want the
segment of smaller earners to grow?”

Given a population of X, 1% of X will always be the same number. If the population grows to (X+Y), then 1% of (X+Y) will be larger than 1% of X. This is the only way to grow the number of earners in a segment. Instead, what most people want is to have the highest fixed percentage of earners represent a lower percentage of total income.

Catherine,
this is great! 
+ income returns per household, v. strong

I think the picture is incomplete if we only know about inequality. We have to see absolute income as well. Looking at plots of world income across countries its very clear that we all started with terrible GDP per capita. Then one by one countries industrialize and their income takes off. Some countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa haven’t done so (yet). The income inequality has been rising like crazy over the last 200 years, but I dont think we’d argue that western europe should have stayed poor to maintain equality. Its mostly not true that the growth of the global rich (everyone in the US) has been at the cost of the poor. So it matters a lot when talking about the US whether the super-rich are simply getting super rich because for instance they went to college a lot of years and are productive, and everyone else is staying the same because they haven’t changed productivity, OR if the super rich are getting rich from a zero-sum pool of money and at the expense of the poor. I think there has to be a plot of median income in each quin-tile, or the inequality plots simply dont provide a way to get the whole picture.

Also it would be useful to know if your quin-tiles are calculated using median income in the income band or using total money in the band. If using total money then the top quin-tile can be skewed by a single super rich individual, even though that really doesnt say much about the country overall. But which-ever, it should be made clear.