I don't have completely up to date data but I do have some data. OTOH Krugman and his supporters also present no data to suggest that the top 1% is the same or even that "it is the top 1% or 3%, shifting back and forth depending on luck in investments...".
Once again I note I am asked for data, but somehow the other side doesn't have to produce relevant data.
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The Mismeasure of Poverty
policyreview.org
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The new tax return data support the conclusion of earlier research which concluded that the degree of income mobility in American society renders the comparison of quintile income levels over time virtually meaningless. According to the tax data, 85.8 percent of filers in the bottom quintile in 1979 had exited this quintile by 1988. The corresponding mobility rates were 71 percent for the second lowest quintile, 67 percent for the middle quintile, 62.5 percent for the fourth quintile, and 35.3 percent for the top quintile.
Of those in the much discussed top 1 percent, over half, or 52.7 percent, were gone by 1988. These data understate income mobility in the top 1 percent to the extent mortality contributes to mobility and the diffusion of income. Graph 1 displays the income mobility of the various groups.
Click here to see Graph 1.
house.gov
In all but the top quintile, at least 60 percent of filers exited their 1979 income quintile by 1988, with two-thirds or more exiting in the bottom three quintiles. Though much more stability was observed in the top fifth, over one-third had slipped downward to be replaced by others moving up. Even most of the top 1 percent had exited by 1988, to be replaced by others.
The very high degree of income mobility displayed above shows that the composition of the various quintiles changes greatly over time. A majority of filers have indeed moved to different quintiles between 1979 and 1988. Thus intertemporal comparisons of average wages, earnings, or private incomes of quintiles cannot provide meaningful measures of changes in the income of actual families and persons only temporarily in a given quintile or percentile. Quintiles may be a convenient way of presenting snapshots of income data for a group of people at a certain point in time. Nonetheless, the notion of a quintile as a fixed economic class or social reality is a statistical mirage.
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About 86 percent of those in the bottom quintile in 1979 had managed to raise their incomes by 1988 enough to have moved up to a higher quintile. The data show that these were not all grouped at the bottom at the second quintile. While 20.7 percent were in the second quintile, 25.0 percent had made it into the middle fifth, and another 25.3 percent into the second highest quintile. The 14.7 percent in the top quintile was actually higher than the 14.2 percent still stuck in the bottom fifth. In other words, a member of the bottom income bracket in 1979 would have a better chance of moving to the top income bracket by 1988 than remaining in the bottom bracket.
house.gov
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The empirical data support the view of the market economy as a dynamic and open society which provides opportunity to those who participate. There is no evidence of stagnation, with the turnover rate in the most stable quintile -- the top fifth -- exceeding 35 percent. The turnover rates in the bottom four quintiles were at least 60 percent over the period, with most of this reflecting upward progress. Analysis which assumes or suggests stable composition of family or household income quintiles rests on invalid assumptions. It makes no sense to draw sweeping conclusions such as "the income of the bottom 20 percent of families fell" in a 15-year period when most of the people originally in that category have long since improved their standard of living enough to have moved up from the bracket entirely.
Christopher Frenze
Senior Economist
house.gov
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"Americans have in fact been getting substantially richer. Between 1953 and 1993, say W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm in Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We're Better Off Than We Think (1999), inflation-adjusted per capita personal income--a comprehensive measure that includes wages and other compensation such as health insurance and retirement plans--rose by about 1.85 percent annually. The boost in income has been very broad-based and cuts across all economic strata.
For instance, an ongoing University of Michigan longitudinal study of several thousand representative individuals found that between 1975 and 1991, people starting in the lowest income bracket on average gained about $28,000 in real income. Such widespread class mobility helps to explain shifting and divergent tastes. Cox and Alm have also documented the ways in which the increase in income has been greatly magnified by a decrease in the real cost of many consumer goods. Calculating goods in terms of the hours an average industrial laborer would need to work to buy a given product, Cox and Alm find, for instance, that the work time required to purchase a movie ticket is only two-thirds of what it was in 1970; that VCRs today cost only 9 percent of what they did 20 years ago; and that camcorders cost only 28 percent of what they did 10 years ago.
Generally rising wealth has been matched by large-scale increases in education and leisure time. In 1970, for instance, only 52 percent of the population over 25 years of age had a high school diploma and only 11 percent had earned a bachelor's degree or more. By 1995, those totals looked very different: 82 percent had graduated high school and 23 percent had graduated college."
reason.com
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Also see
reason.com
catallarchy.net
willwilkinson.net
willwilkinson.net
tcsdaily.com
coyoteblog.com |
