Economic Inequality Later in Life

Levels of economic inequality—encompassing inequality in the distribution of income and wealth—have hit unprecedented heights and appear to be rising. In 2014, the average income for adults in the United States was $64,600. How­ever, this average obscures a great deal of hetero­geneity (Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, 2018). The bottom 50 percent of adults earned on average $16,200 per year, while the middle 40 percent earned roughly the same income as the U.S. aver­age. In stark contrast, the top 10 percent received 47 percent of all U.S. income—$304,000, which is 4.7 times the national average, while the top 1 per­­cent of adults earned $1,300,000—twenty times the national average income. Today, the top 1 per­­cent takes home more than 20 percent of all in­­come in the United States.

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