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

by Catherine Mulbrandon on January 12, 2012

First published in Slate to accompany an article written by Tim Noah, I created these graphs about income inequality covering the changes in income inequality as well as looking at changes in race, gender, education, taxes and political party in the White House.

  • Anonymous

    Maybe I don’t get it but don’t we want the blue and green portions of the Income Share chart to get larger?    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?

  • Anonymous

    “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.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks, Glodime for your reply. Yes, lessening disparity is ideal but it depends on the standard of living. If the standard of living is high even for low earners, however, that should be a part of income – albeit not perfectly measurable in terms of real income. There are many sides to this. Great charts.

  • http://blog.courtneybolton.com courtneyBolton

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

  • Pingback: Clocking Out: Affordable Care Act Up! Edition « Main Street

  • http://tpettit.best.vwh.net/ Teri Pettit

    Can’t stand black backgrounds. Can you release these in white?

  • Pingback: The “Glitter Diamond All-Star Fashion Show” Daily Quinn « The Daily Quinn

  • Anonymous

    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.

Previous post:

Next post: