Income Inequality in the US Has Been Increasing Since the 1970s

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“According to Emanuel Saez, an economics professor at UC-Berkeley, U.S. income inequality has been increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928”
-Pew Research Center 2013

Americans Have a Distorted Sense of the Level of US Wealth Inequality

“Associate professor of business Michael I. Norton found that respondents to his surveys (conducted in 2013) universally think that wealth is more evenly distributed in the United States than it actually is—and what’s more, respondents say they would prefer for the wealth to be still more evenly spread around. More than 80 percent of the wealth in the United States belongs to 20 percent of the population; respondents estimated that this group held less than 60 percent of the wealth, and would in an ideal world hold about a third.”
-Harvard Magazine 2011

The Wealth Gap in America is Still Growing

“A December (2014) by the Pew Research Center found that the wealth gap between the country’s top 20 percent of earners and the rest of America had stretched to its widest point in at least three decades. Last year, the median net worth of upper-income families reached $639,400, nearly seven times as much of those in the middle, and nearly 70 times the level of those at the bottom of the income ladder.”
-NYTimes 2013

Median Net Worth of US Law Makers in 2015

“The median net worth of national lawmakers in 2015 was just over $1 million in 2013, or 18 times the wealth of the typical American household, according to new research released by the Center for Responsive Politics.”
-CNN Money 2015

Where You’re Born Correlates with Economic Mobility

“Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”
-NYTimes 2013

The Distribution of Wealth and Land in the US

upworthy.com 2010