Median US Family Income by Income Percentile (Inflation Adjusted) [OC]

Some quite relevant things to note about this misleading chart:

  1. the lower percentile wages increased at a higher rate than the top percentile, but the chart makes it look like the opposite.
  2. people will automatically draw the conclusion that the same people in the bottom percentile stay there, and that the people in the top percentile stay there. This is completely untrue. There are in fact people who, in 1989 were in the bottom percentile who are now in the top. The opposite is also true.
  3. This chart only shows income percentile. It implies to many, that the top percentile and bottom percentiles contain the same amount of people and it would be easy to just redistribute wealth from top to bottom. This is silly. There are 50x as many people in the bottom percentile as there are in the top.
/r/dataisbeautiful Thread Link - i.redd.it