[Peace-discuss] More Piketty etc., Abstract

[David Green]

 This national income data is not family or household (or even worker per se). The authors attempt to assign national income (basically, GDP), to all individual adults, over 230 million, including government spending, transfers (social security), healthcare benefits, etc. The 57 page paper can be accessed online; the final 20 pages or so are charts that summarize the data.
ABSTRACT
This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of
national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture
100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income
distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pre-tax
and post-tax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government
redistribution affects inequality. Average pre-tax national income per adult has increased 60%
since 1980, but we find that it has stagnated for the bottom 50% of the distribution at about
$16,000 a year. The pre-tax income of the middle class—adults between the median and the 90th
percentile—has grown 40% since 1980, faster than what tax and survey data suggest, due in
particular to the rise of tax-exempt fringe benefits. Income has boomed at the top: in 1980, top
1% adults earned on average 27 times more than bottom 50% adults, while they earn 81 times
more today. The upsurge of top incomes was first a labor income phenomenon but has mostly
been a capital income phenomenon since 2000. The government has offset only a small fraction
of the increase in inequality. The reduction of the gender gap in earnings has mitigated the
increase in inequality among adults. The share of women, however, falls steeply as one moves up
the labor income distribution, and is only 11% in the top 0.1% today.
Thomas Piketty
Paris School of Economics
48 Boulevard Jourdan
75014 Paris, France
piketty at ens.fr
Emmanuel Saez
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
and NBER
saez at econ.berkeley.edu
Gabriel Zucman
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
and NBER
zucman at berkeley.edu
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