Emmanuel Saez, 36, a public economics expert teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, was awarded the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal last week. Nobody has done more to describe the broad changes in income distribution in the United States that have taken place during the last ninety years.
This best off decile of earners had one heyday in the “Roaring 1920s,” when their share reached nearly 45 percent of national income. There they remained until about 1940, when norms associated with the conduct of World War II apparently knocked them down to around 33 percent of the total. Their share remained remarkably stable for the next three decades, at around a third of national income, until the mid-1970s.
Then the top decile’s share began to climb again, hitting 49.7 of national income in 2006, higher than any year since 1917 and surpassing its level in 1928, Saez found. It took $104,700 in market income for a family to make the top 10 percent in 2006.
Moreover, most of that improvement owed to record gains for families in the top one percent of income (earning more than $382,600). It was the very rich whose fortunes seemed to have been at the center of the story of income distribution, Saez wrote in "Striking It Richer" in the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality’s Pathways Magazine – from nearly a quarter of the whole in the late 1920s, to less than 10 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, before climbing back to nearly a quarter by 2006.
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