Over at Obscene Desserts, John posts a recent graph from the Economist showing the top 1% income earners in the United States lifting off into the stratosphere while the rest stagnate:
This got me wondering whether this is just an American phenomenon. The Paris School of Economics has a database on income shares on their website that lets you slice and dice the income data by nation, income percentile. It seems to be a work-in-progress, since you can't really change the default settings, but you can generate a few interesting maps, which I've gathered from there and from other sites:
So, just about everywhere you look in the industrialized world, the top 1% have been doing somewhat better, but in the United States they have really blown the doors off, probably because of winner-take-all effects. I can't find statistics for Germany, but I can hardly imagine they would differ that much from France or the Netherlands. Or might they....?
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