Just to give you a sense as to what are the thresholds for being in the top 1%,
here in the United States as of the year 2013, if a family
makes more than $389,000 in income, that family would be within the top 1%.
Or if a family has more than $7.9
million in wealth, net worth that is, then that family would
be within the top 1% of the wealth distribution in the United States.
If we consider this indicator of the income that goes
to the top 1% of the population as a percentage of all income in the country,
we can then see the evolution over a longer period of time.
We have here a chart that starts in the year 1910 and
goes all the way to the present time.
And we have a number of reach countries as well
as emerging markets represented on the chart.
And what we can see is that when we adopt a longer time period,
since the beginning of the 20th century, then we see a u-shaped pattern,
whereby, inequality was relatively high in the 1910s and the 1920s.
And it started come down at around 1940 or 1945, 1950 reaching a low
as of the year 1980 and then starting to increase again in most of these countries.
So in other words, the 1950s and the 1960s were years during which
economic growth and prosperity was more widely shared than either in the 1910s or
20s or in the 1980s, 1990s and at the present time.
It's important to keep in mind then that essentially over time, we see
very complex patterns in the evolution of income inequality in the world.