I was doing my usual perusal of news and commentary throughout the blogosphere, earlier on Thursday, and I came across this quite stunning chart (see below) from Bard College and Levy Institute economist Pavlina Tcherneva. She’ll be discussing her graphics (republished throughout the blogosphere over the past 36+ hours, along with commentary by folks such as Ryan Cooper, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Justin Wolfers, and a slew of other well-known economists, bloggers and journalists) in a presentation at the 12th International Post-Keynesian Conference at the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC), Saturday. However, Tcherneva’s work is already trending on Twitter, as you read this.
Here’s Matt Yglesias with his take on the most widely-mentioned of Tcherneva’s graphics--which are based upon statistics from French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestseller, “Capital In The 21st Century”--headlined, “The most important chart about the American economy you'll see this year,” over at Vox.com…
Pavlina Tcherneva's chart showing the distribution of income gains during periods of economic expansion is burning up the economics internet over the past 24 hours and for good reason. The trend it depicts is shocking:
Yglesias continues…
For a long time, most of the gains from economic growth went to the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution. And, after all, the bottom 90 percent includes the vast majority of people. Since 1980, that hasn't been the case. And for the first several years of the current expansion, the bottom 90 percent saw inflation-adjusted incomes continue to fall.
The data series ends in 2012 and we don't know how long the expansion will last, so that negative income trend may evaporate before all is said and done. But unless there's a massive break with the previous three expansions we will continue to have an economy where the typical family's living standards grow much more slowly than GDP growth per se would allow.
(For the record,
Tcherneva doesn't appear to be Yglesias' biggest fan.)
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