America's Poorest 5% = India's Richest 5%

Mon, 01/31/2011 - 13:27 EDT - Dr. Mark J. Perry

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Catherine Rampell features the chart above today on the Economix blog, taken from a new book "The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality" by Branko Milanovic. The chart shows the relationship between a) the distribution of income by "ventiles" (5% groups) for the U.S., Brazil, China and India on the horizontal axis and b) the percentile of world income distribution on the vertical axis. As Catherine comments:"Notice how the entire line for the United States resides in the top portion of the graph? That’s because the entire country is relatively rich. In fact, America’s bottom ventile is still richer than most of the world: That is, the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants (see dashed line in graph).Now check out the line for India. India’s poorest ventile corresponds with the 4th poorest percentile worldwide. And its richest? The 68th percentile. Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. Kind of blows your mind, right?"MP: Yes, and shouldn't it also blow away a lot our misguided concern about rising income inequality in the U.S.?

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World Income Inequality
Here, courtesy of Catherine Rampell of Economix, is a remarkable chart from Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and Have Nots. Along the horizontal axis are within-country income percentiles running from the bottom 5% (1st ventile) to the top 5% (20th ventile).
Visualizing the 2012 Distribution of Income in the U.S. by Age
Where do you fit in the 2012 ranking of total money income by age group in the United States? While we've previously built a tool where you can find out your percentile ranking among all individuals, men, women, families and households in the U.S., we thought it might be fun to break the data for individuals down a little differently - by age group!
Visualizing the 2012 Distribution of Income in the U.S. by Age
Where do you fit in the 2012 ranking of total money income by age group in the United States? While we've previously built a tool where you can find out your percentile ranking among all individuals, men, women, families and households in the U.S., we thought it might be fun to break the data for individuals down a little differently - by age group!
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From the paper "
Income and Distribution Comparisons
This is a set of very useful data on income and inequality from the OECD Factbook. To make it fit on my blog I’ve had to reproduce the chart in somewhat cramped and hard to read form, but if you click on the image you’ll see a larger version:
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The Aggregate Distribution of U.S. Household Income in 2010
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MOST adults accept that life is not fair, but the word fairness gets used a lot when we talk about income inequality. Is it right that some have so much material comfort and security, while others have so little? On the other hand, is it fair that talented, hard-working people must give away the fruits of their labour? What’s fair and whether it matters depend on one's personal values. But for policymakers, the important issue to think about is the nature of the income inequality. Are the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class stay the same?

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America's Poorest 5% = India's Richest 5%

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