a fifty year view
During the work for my forthcoming book, The Silent Theft: the $79 trillion heist that rewrote the American economic deal, I came to see that we need to take a fifty-year view of the changes in the economy that have produced the tsunami of wealth and income inequalities and the intensified insecurities for almost all Americans.
Here is a view from that perspective of US income inequality of the last fifty years. See the chart above.
The bottom 50% of Americans saw their share of income between 1978 and 2024 decline by 40%. For the bottom 75% the share declined by 29%. Meanwhile, the share held by the top 1% rose by 162%. In 1978, there were 13 billionaires in the US.(1) As of 2024, they numbered 802. Midway through 2025, the number has increased to over 900.(2)
See the earlier post Wealth Inequality in the US.
Footnotes
(1) This discussion of the number of billionaires is a bit of apples and oranges. The post is talking about income, while wealth is about ownership of assets. Nevertheless, this mention of the number of billionaires is still a useful bit of framing.
(2)https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
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