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U.S. Income Distribution: Just How Unequal? | Inequality.org - 0 views

inequality.org/l-americas-income-distribution

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shared by Jessica Olsen on 12 Jan 13 - No Cached

he Gini coefficient was first defined in a 1912 paper by the Italian economist Corrado Gini (1884-1965). The coefficient measures the degree the degree of concentration in a country’s income distribution. Social statisticians today use many different inequality measures, but none more than the Gini coefficient.
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The Gini coefficient amounts to a kind of percentage and can run from 0 to 100. A Gini of 0 represents 0 percent concentration in a country’s income distribution. In a country with a Gini coefficient of 0, everyone receives exactly the same income
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A Gini coefficient of 100 represents 100 percent concentration in a country’s income distribution. In a country with a Gini of 100, one person receives all of the country’s income. Everyone else gets nothing.
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A Gini of 50 could mean that half the people share all of the income while the other half get nothing. In other words, a country that literally consisted of haves and have-nots in a 50-50 split would have a Gini coefficient of 50.
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According to the Census Bureau, the official Gini coefficient for the United States was 46.9 in 2010, the most recent year with data available. This is way up from the all-time low of 38.6 set in 1968.
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A major gap in the measurement of income inequality is the exclusion of capital gains, profits made on increases in the value of investments. Capital gains are excluded for purely practical reasons. The Census doesn’t ask about them, so they can’t be included in inequality statistics.
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