Exploring Income Inequality, Part 2: The Loss of Shared Prosperity

The slideshow below — the first in this week’s series on income inequality — shows that the years from the end of World War II into the early 1970s saw substantial income growth and broadly shared prosperity.  But this trend ended in the early 1970s, when income disparities started widening as incomes began to grow much faster at the top than in the middle or bottom.

The slideshow presents family income data from the Census Bureau.  While these data are useful for illustrating the widening of income inequality beginning in the 1970s, other data are superior for assessing more recent trends, as we explain in our new guide on examining income inequality.

Tomorrow, we’ll examine income growth in recent decades.