Andrew Hagen writes:
>(Are you suggesting that there is a global polarization of income and
>wealth? Would you say poor people worldwide became worse off or better
>off in the 1990s? My current understanding is that poor people
>worldwide become somewhat better off in the 1990s.)
***** For some reason, the 1990s do not share the 1980s' bad
reputation for stagnation in average incomes and polarization between
the extremes, but it should. The median real income of U.S.
households fell 7.3% between 1989 and 1993; a bit over half that loss
has been regained, but 1996's figure was still 3.0% below 1989's.
(The median is the spot at the middle of a distribution, with half
the population coming in above that level, and half below. It's a
better measure of distribution than the arithmetic average or mean,
since very high incomes would pull misleadingly pull such an average
up. Medians, however, are unmoved by good times at the upper
extremes.) Recent performance is far worse than that of the 1980s --
though it's likely that things will look a bit better when 1997
figures are reported next October.
The chart below offers a fuller picture of what's been going on
behind these averages: stagnation, with a slight downward bias, for
poor and middle-income households, and strong growth at the high end.
Put another way, almost all the benefits of economic growth, at least
by official measures of inflation-adjusted income, have gone to the
richest 5% of U.S. households. The next 15% have done well, if not
spectacularly, while the bottom 80% has been lucky to stay in place.
(Another way of thinking of this is that about 95% of the benefits of
economic growth over the last 25 years have gone to the richest 5%.)
Because of this, more people are working longer hours than at any
time in modern history, which, while it helps keep up incomes, is
hell on both home life and the public culture. People who work 50
hours a week or more have little spare energy for anything more
challenging than a TV.
<http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Stats_incpov.html> *****
***** By Mark Weisbrot
September 8, 1999
Black Radical Congress
There's a sleeper issue for the 2000 elections that a presidential
candidate could just possibly ride to victory if there were anyone
with the guts to grab it. It's something that most of the electorate
cares deeply about, but none of the candidates seem willing to
address.
The issue? Income distribution. It's not just the poor, whom
politicians are counting on to stay away from the polls in large
numbers, who have been getting the short end of the stick for the
past two decades. It's the overwhelming majority of the electorate.
Consider this: Since 1977, the real after-tax income of the majority
of Americans has gone nowhere, in an economy that has grown by fifty
percent per person. At the same time the income of the richest one
percent has more than doubled -- a 115 percent increase, according to
the most recent study from the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities. They are now hauling down more than $515,000 a year on
average, up from $240,000 twenty-two years ago. (All these numbers
are adjusted for inflation).
Meanwhile, the average compensation package of chief executive
officers at America's major firms reached $10.6 million last year,
soaring more than 400 percent in just the 1990s.
The results of this growing concentration of income are startling:
the richest one percent of Americans (2.7 million people) now have
more take-home pay than 100 million of their fellow citizens combined.
Remember this is income, not wealth, which is much more highly
concentrated. The richest one percent now hold 39 percent of the
nation's wealth, more than twice as much as belongs to the bottom 80
percent of the population.
These statistics confirm what most voters already know from their
life experience. Most are old enough to remember when it was
possible for a typical working family, even with only one income, to
buy a house, raise kids and send them to college -- without piling up
a debt burden the size of Sub-Saharan Africa's. And those who aren't
old enough to have such memories -- generation X and below-- are
facing entry level wages and salaries that have declined sharply
since the 1970s.
<http://www.corpwatch.org/trac/corner/worldnews/other/455.html> *****
***** The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been
charting this gap in its annual human development reports. The
income gap between the fifth of the world's people living in the
richest countries and the fifth in the poorest was 74 to 1 in 1997,
up from 60 to 1 in 1990 and 30 to 1 in 1960, it said in its 1999
report.
<http://www.ireland.com/special/reviews/2000/world/world17.htm>
*****
Yoshie
