One of the issues that ties a lot of these pictures is income inequality, which has been rising in the United States for decades. In fact, income gains have been heavily skewed toward the top even among high earners,
The growth of CEO pay illustrates this trend very well. In 1965, a typical corporate CEO earned about twenty times that of a typical worker; by 2018, the ratio was 278:1, according to a progressive think thank the Economic Policy Institute.
Between 1978 and 2018, CEO compensation increased by more than 900 percent while worker compensation increased by just 11.9 percent.
But the picture is very much the same if we lookat wealth—that is, total net worth rather than yearly income.
In 2021, the top 10 percent of Americans held nearly 70 percent of U.S. wealth (up from about 61 percent at the end of 1989).
The share held by the next 40 percent fell correspondingly over that period. The bottom 50 percent (roughly 63 million families) had about 2.5 percent of wealth in 2021.
Inequality in the United States also outpaces that of other rich nations. This is captured by the steady rise in the U.S. Gini coefficient, a measure which shows a country's economic inequality and ranges from zero (completely equal) to one hundred (completely unequal).
The US had Gini coefficient of 40 in 2019—the same as Bulgaria’s and Turkey’s, and significantly higher than that of Canada, France, and Germany—according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Recent economic shocks only deepened these trends. The so-called Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 caused incomes to fall, and even when they recovered to pre-recession levels in 2015, the median income was the same as it was in 2000: $70,200.
However, the recovery was unequal: by 2016, the top 10 percent had more wealth than they did in 2007 while the bottom 90 percent had less.
Experts believe the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic, including the largest spike in unemployment in modern history, will exacerbate inequality in the same way.
Low-wage workers were far more likely to be laid off and less likely to be rehired, though massive government stimulus helped blunt the impact. Meanwhile, a boom in stock and home prices primarily benefited wealthy Americans, who own more of these assets. Though wages rose at the fastest pace in decades, so did prices, and this inflation effectively canceled out wage gains.
