This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
I’m sorry but this is a wildly inaccurate way to portray the data. This image is portraying not the cut that every group gets, but the wealth that the average individual in that group gets. These individual averages per group are then added up to 100% and then everybody gets a slice out of that 100%.
To show you how this is inaccurate say we did this with 10 people. We have 2 groups. Group 1 has 9 people who average 1 dollar and then group 2 has 1 person who owns 2 dollars. In that example group 2 has 2 dollars combined and group 1 has 9 dollars combined. This would mean the groups own 18% and 82% of the wealth respectively. But according to how this comic portrays it, as per Capita, the pizza slice of group 2 would be ⅔ of the pizza and group 1 gets ⅓ of the pizza, which is not accurate at all to how the wealth is actually distributed.
Using this per capita metric is highly misleading if we are to use it in that way. The top 1% in the USA in actuality holds 32,5% of the wealth in the USA which would create a totally different pizza than the one in the comic.
I think that’s the whole point. It’s not trying to paint an overview of the economy, but rather to show what portion a typical member of each class gets to live off of.
Images like you describe that show the breakdown for each entire class? Those are not hard to find.
I just don’t think it’s an honest way to show the data. You could use the exact same method but put the richest individual as one group and the entire rest of humanity as another group and show that the top 1 person gets the entire pizza except for one microscopic crumb but of course that would be extremely misleading. I’m fine with per Capita wealth per wealth group as a metric but it doesn’t lend itself to be used in circular graphs. A bar graph would be less misleading. But of course that wouldn’t be good in a comic. I’m also against extreme wealth inequality but we are not going to solve it by misrepresenting the data. The non misrepresented data is already telling enough.
There’s 4 people in the image. If the 4 of them split a pizza based on their wealth, this is what each would get. How is that misleading?
1: I think the average reader of this comic won’t understand it correctly without thinking deeply about how “per capita” affects the size of the pizza slices compared to a non per capita version.
2: Looking at this graph one would think that the entire problem with wealth inequality lies with the top 1%. However the next top 9% own more wealth combined than the top 1% do. This comic represents the “merely wealthy” as a victim but I would argue the opposite. To even enter the top 10% category you need over 2.5 million dollars. Top 5% is almost 5 million dollars. They get an unfairly large slice of the pie too.
The top x% owning y% of combined wealth is a standard measure of wealth inequality. This is literally what the Lorenz curve describes and the basis for the well-known Gini coefficient.
That being said, the proportions in the comic aren’t really in line with the figures I know. Wealth inequality is increasing in the US, but the wealth share of the top 1% currently is more like 33% (still bad but far away from the pizza example).
This cartoon does not use “top x% owning y% of combined wealth”. It uses a per capita version which is very different from what you’re talking about. And that’s my entire point.
Gotcha, I was wondering what the “per capita” meant and saw it explained in a different comment. In that case, I agree that this is misleading.
Yo know who I expect to have the most scrutinized data? Cartoons.
Dr. W. E. Coyote PhD, now that was a scientist with some goddamn tegrity!
The cartoon would then have to show the relative sizes of the groups as well (about 6 to 1), so 1 person gets 2/3 while 6 people get to share 1/3. Or, each person in the 1% gets 2/3 of the pizza, and each person in the 50% gets 1/18 of the pizza. Or, the 1% get 12 times more. The real figures are a lot worse, with the bottom 50% holding about 1/50 of the total household wealth, while the 1% hold 1/3 and the rest being distributed among the other 49%. The reality therefore is that those 6 people have to split 1/50th of a pizza, for 1/300th of a pizza each. What would 1/300th of a pizza look like? Crumbs I reckon.
Anyway, it’s a cartoon.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2011.2,2026.2
The point of the bottom 50% enjoying 2 pepperonis is the accurate part
You make a compelling argument. One word for you though, per capita.
That’s two words.
Fair enough.
ALSO two words, although I know you never claimed otherwise. ;-)
And people over 55 own 73% (most of the top 1% that isn’t tech billionaires, are also old people after all). Start taxing corporations more and they won’t be able to retire the way they have, so they’re naturally against that. Good luck figuring it out without magically increasing birth rates to have more workers per retiree, or having your old people live in squalor so young people can have better lives (potentially driving up birth rates if they feel they can afford children)