"America’s Top 1% Don’t Make as Much as You Might Think"
December 04, 2023
Can a single self-published paper really refute decades of work by three famous economists? If the paper is the modestly titled “Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends,” then the answer — with qualifications — is yes. . . .
More concretely, looking at pre-tax income, the share of the top 1% has gone up only 2.6 percentage points since the early 1960s. For after-tax income, top income shares haven’t changed much at all.