The Rich Get Richer: 2010 Was a Very Good Year to Be in the 1%

During the Great Recession, the 1% absorbed half of total income losses between 2007 and 2009. But in the first year of the recovery, the top percentile won 93% of all income gains. For a while, it was fair to say that income inequality was decreasing. No longer.

The rich are different from you and me, because they have more money. But they’re also different because their money has a tendency to yo-yo more dramatically between downturns and upswings. The 1% took more than half of all losses in the 2001 recession, and then two-thirds of the income gains in the recovery, according to updated research posted on Emmanuel Saez’s website today. Income volatility is apparently the price you pay for being worth a million dollars. 

As for this recession, Tim Noah puts it beautifully: This recovery has been a luxury item. For the bottom 99%, real income growth over the first two years of the recovery was one-fifth of one percent. The richest percentile saw its income rebound by 11.6%. It is only slightly sensational to point out that the 1%’s income has outgained the rest of the economy by a factor of 58 in the recovery.

Read more. [Image: Emmanuel Saez, et. al.]

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   About Atlantic Magazine:

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    Related articles “The so-called sharing economy has taken off in the Great Recession, as companies like Netflix and…”...

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    Except, their downswings are still better than our upswings.

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    we just needed a graph to confirm what one always knew.

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    Of course.

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