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Income inequality in the USA

Geoff Riley

9th October 2009

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The Economist carries a short feature on the scale of income inequality in the USA and finds that a quarter of America’s total income is earned by the top 1% of the population.

“The concentration of income earned by this top percentile now stands at its highest since 1928. Two-thirds of the country’s total gains in the five years to 2007 accrued to the top 1%, whereas the bottom 90th percentile saw only 12% of the extra income.”

We have been looking at income inequality as part of our study on measuring the standard of living. Wikipedia carries up to date information on measures such as the Gini coefficient for countries where the relevant data is available.

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Geoff Riley

Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for nearly forty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD and Revision conferences in the UK and overseas.

@tutor2uGeoff

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