I think he's talking about
this, onetime2:
Quote:
MM: How do economists measure levels of equality and inequality?
Wolff: The most common measure used, and the most understandable is: what share of total wealth \ is owned by the richest households, typically the top 1 percent. In the United States, in the last survey year, 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of all wealth.
This is the most easily understood measure.
There is also another measure called the Gini coefficient. It measures the concentration of wealth at different percentile levels, and does an overall computation. It is an index that goes from zero to one, one being the most unequal. Wealth inequality in the United States has a Gini coefficient of .82, which is pretty close to the maximum level of inequality you can have.
MM: What have been the trends of wealth inequality over the last 25 years?
Wolff: We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.
Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.
Income inequality has also risen. Most people date this rise to the early 1970s, but it hasn't gone up nearly as dramatically as wealth inequality.
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While we do have more better off folks in this country, we have a many more worse off folks. I'm not really sure if this is even a solvable problem. I read recently that the average CEO 25 years ago had an income 12 times that of the average worker, now it is something like 100 times that of the average worker (I may be off on the percentages, but the net increase is about right).