Don’t Bury the Middle Class
Inequality continues to push Americans apart. The incomes of the top ten percent of adults are almost nine times greater than those of the bottom ten percent in the latest data. The top ten percent were just five times richer than the bottom ten percent in the late 1970s - the heyday of American opportunity and equality. The explosion of incomes for the top 1 percent have grabbed the headlines, but the poor are poorer now too. The threshold between the bottom ten percent and the rest is now 24% below where it was in 1977.
The growing economic gap has altered society. Income now predicts many things better than it did thirty years ago, including where people live, who they vote for, whether they are in good health or ill, and even how happy they feel. To put it another way, money is not only less equally distributed but also more consequential.
Pundits have begun to speak of the eclipse, passing, or outright disappearance of America’s middle class. They exaggerate. More Americans are in the middle of the income distribution than at the extremes, just as in the 1970s. The attached figure quantifies the change. It shows the complete distribution of incomes in the most recent data (2010 incomes, reported in March 2011 data) and in a typical late-seventies year (1977).