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%.
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.