Tag Archives: income distribution

The Worsening Distribution of Income: The Top 1% vs. the Other 99%

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The Occupy Wall Street and related groups have brought to the fore concerns about the distribution of income in the US.  And there is validity to these concerns, as the distribution of income has deteriorated markedly in recent decades, starting with the Reagan period in the 1980s.  The share of the top 1% has well more than doubled, to a level not seen since the 1920’s just prior to the Great Depression, with this coming out of a declining share of the bottom 90%.

The graph above is taken from material assembled by Professor Emmanuel Saez and his colleagues and co-authors, and is available through his web site (link here). The specific data here is from a July 2010 update of material originally published by Professor Saez with Professor Thomas Piketty in 2003, with data now through 2008.  Professor Saez and colleagues from around the world have assembled an amazing set of data for a large number of countries, using tax return data to produce long time series of family (tax unit) income levels.  Such data can go much farther back in time than available income surveys will allow, to produce historical data otherwise unavailable.  While there are drawbacks (for example, tax units are not always the same as the household units one would prefer), nothing else can span such periods of time.

The US data show that there was a previous boom in the 1920s in the income share of the top 1%, peaking at 23.9% of national income in 1928.  But the share then fell in the Great Depression and during World War II, and with the reforms and structural changes implemented during that period, eventually came to about a 10% share in the 1950s and 1960s, and to about 9% in the 1970s.  But it then started to grow, and reached a 23.5% share in 2007.  It fell back in 2008, with the onset of the financial collapse in the last year of the Bush Administration.  But as noted in this blog posting of November 26 on this site, profits rebounded in 2009 to now, so it is likely the top 1% share has also rebounded.

It is also interesting that this increase in income concentration is essentially only at the very top:  the top 1% is seeing almost all of the increase.  Those in the 90 to 95% percentile, and in the 95 to 99% percentile, have seen some trend rise in their income shares in recent decades, but they have been close to flat.  Rather, the higher share of the top 1% has come out of a falling share of the bottom 90% (the shares of all groups together must sum to 100%).  The share of the bottom 90% has dipped to about 50%, from a level of about 65% (plus of minus a percentage point or two) from 1942 to 1982.  This is a remarkable change after four decades of such stability.

Another interesting calculation, done by Professor Saez, found that 52% of the increase in real national income between 1993 and 2008 accrued to the top 1% of families, even though this top 1% only had a 14% share of national income at the start of this period (and 21% at the end).  That is, more than half of income growth over this 15 year period went to just the top 1% of the population, and where this group accounted for only a 14% share of income at the beginning.  Had the growth been balanced, the top 1% would have obtained 14% of the income growth, not 52% of it.

The data here does not explain why there has been this increasing concentration of income in the US.  One has also seen increasing concentration in other countries around the world in recent decades (the data is available here), which suggests some basic global structural changes are part of the cause.  But the global pattern has not been as extreme as in the US, suggesting that policy changes in the US begun under Reagan and continued since, are also part of the cause.

Profits Are Up, While Employee Compensation Stagnates

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Aggregate profits in the national economy, while volatile, have grown rapidly over the past decade, while employee compensation has been lackluster.  Profits (defined here as including corporate profits [the largest component], proprietor’s income, rental income, net interest income and business transfers) plus Compensation of Employees (along with a smaller third category, for taxes on production and imports less subsidies, plus the net surplus or deficit on government enterprises such as the Post Office), sum up to National Income.  Note that Compensation of Employees is the total compensation for all workers as a group, and is not per worker.  The Bureau of Economic Analysis of the US Department of Commerce provides estimates as part of the National Income and Product Accounts, and the most recent figures were released on November 22.  The graphs and figures shown here come from analysis of that underlying data.

Profits, Employee Compensation, and overall National Income grew at similar (and slow) rates between 2001 and the third quarter of 2003.  Profits then took off, rising rapidly until mid-2006, after which they pulled back some (but with levels relative to 2001 still well above the levels for Employee Compensation; overall National Income will be in between).  Profits then fell rapidly with the 2008 economic collapse, as did Employee Compensation and hence overall National Income, so that by early 2009 they were each only 8% above (in real terms) their level in early 2001, eight years before.  But from that trough, Profits bounced back rapidly, so that by late 2010 they had surpassed their previous mid-2006 peak, and then continued to grow strongly in 2011.  Total Compensation of Employees, in contrast, has grown only modestly from its 2009 trough.  Overall National Income is now almost back to its previous peak, but Compensation of Employees is well below, while Profits are well above, their previous peaks.

One can also look at the changes over the cycle:  from 2001 to the peak in National Income in the first quarter of 2008, from that peak to the trough in the second quarter of 2009, and then from that trough to now (the third quarter of 2011).  In the table below, “Growth” is the growth of that component of National Income (in real terms) over the full period, while “Change” is the change over the period in the aggregate income of that group, in real (2005) dollars, in billions:

change in National Income Components

2001Q1 to Peak

 Peak to Trough

Trough to 2011Q3
2005 prices, % growth and billions of US$ Growth Change Growth Change Growth Change
Employee Compensation 12.6% $839b -5.5% -$415b 1.4% $98b
Profits 20.2% $562b -11.2% -$377b 21.6% $646b
Taxes + Gov’t Firms 19.7% $148b -4.9% -$44b 4.2% $36b
National Income 15.1% $1,549b -7.1% -$836b 7.1% $780b

The contrast in the truly abysmal growth in total Compensation of Employees in the recovery (of just 1.4% in real terms from the mid-2009 trough to now), with the rapid growth in Profits (of 21.6% in real terms over this same period), is stark.  Put another way, Profits obtained 83% of the growth in National Income from the trough in the second quarter of 2009 to now (83% = $646b/$780b), even though it only accounted for 27% of National Income at the trough (and 31% now).  Obama has been loudly blamed by Republican politicians for hurting business profits.  There is no evidence of that here.  There has been a strong growth in Profits in this recovery.  While the data analyzed here cannot allow us to determine the causes of these trends, they do allow us to see whether Profits are depressed in the economic recovery.  They clearly are not.

Finally, the data can be used to calculate the share of National Income going to Profits.  This is shown below.  The Profits share has grown strongly over the past decade, and while it fell in the economic collapse in the last year of the Bush Presidency, it has now bounced back to above its previous peak.