About a month ago I had a commenter question my use of certain graphs.
Frankly, he is right, you can’t lean too heavily on one set of stats
because stats can tell whatever story you want them to.
But I
did stumble upon a great research paper created by the Center for Labor
Market Studies at Northeastern University. It is titled Wealth
in America: Who Gets What and How Wealthy Were the Forbes 400 Richest
Billionaires in 2008 Relative to America’s Bottom Half?
I pulled some charts and graphs from it:
This line graph is the result of dividing the Median net worth measure of the US against the Mean from 1995 to 2004. This means that the wealthiest people in the US are getting wealthier at a faster rate than those in the middle. The Mean is 4.81 times greater than the Median in 2004.
This graph shows the average net worth of each decile. The trend line shows how quickly the wealth accumlates at the top.
This graph shows how much the average wealth was increased over the span of 1995 to 2004. The lowest quartile saw no increase in wealth, but the top quartile saw an improvement of 77%.
This graph takes the idea of wealth from a proportional standpoint. So if you baseline it at 100% then this is the make up of the distribution.
This graph show that from 1983 to 2004, everyone did well. But there is a getting rich and then their is accumulating an amazing amount of wealth… and that is what the richest 400 did over that span. They increased their wealth from $250,000,000 to $2,205,000,000.
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This pie chart shows that is take 51% of the population just to equal the same amount of wealth the 400 richest Americans have.
More to come on this…
Working Thoughts 04/23/08
Ei – Earth innovation
Working Thoughts 