This post by James Pethokoukis, who recently hopped over to AEI from Reuters, shows how to combine the worst tendencies of Slate (contrarian shtick), Business Insider (misleading, hyped headlines), and think tanks (paid-for spin), and puts it in internet-friendly listicle format:

5 reasons why income inequality is a myth — and Occupy Wall Street is wrong

This, at least the first part of it, is false in a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me kind of way, which is the whole point. That kind of headline draws you to read the post, which proceeds to give seemingly sound (but ultimately misleading) evidence for why inequality isn’t growing in order to plants seeds of doubt about whether that whole inequality thing is really a problem.

You’re probably not going to take the time to poke holes in it, so I will. A deeper look at this post shows that the body is nearly as flawed as the headline.

First, remember that income inequality is an obvious fact—a glaring one, actually:

The poorest 20 percent of households made an average $11,034 last year, $179 less than they did in 1979. The median income rose to $49,445 last year from $46,074 in 1979, while the top 20 percent made an average $169,633, or $48,536 more than in 1979.

But the real blowout hasn’t been between the 80th and 99th percentiles. It’s been in the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent, which is why that “We Are the 99 percent” slogan has struck such a chord. The poorest member of the top 1 percent made $347,000 in 2007 (the latest year I can find), more than double the $165,049 they made in 1979.

Pethokoukis gets it totally wrong in his first point, reporting on the conclusions of a working paper by Robert Gordon which he sums up as “In other words, income gains were shared fairly equally” between 1979 and 2007. You be the judge:

That’s CBO data, as is this:

But don’t take it from me or from the well respected, nonpartisan CBO. Take it from Pethokoukis’s source himself. Gordon:

The evidence is incontrovertible that American income inequality has increased in the United States since the 1970s.

That’s the very first sentence of Gordon’s paper, which Pethokoukis somehow overlooked. In debunking the inequality of the top 1 percent and everyone else, he also forgets to mention this Gordon quote:

Because of the very different behavior of the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent, this paper treats as two separate topics the causes of changes of inequality at the very top and among the remaining 99 percent of the population.

That’s from page one. Here’s more:

We have seen that the timing and interpretation of increases in top incomes at the top 1.0 and 0.1 percent levels is very different than that in the bottom 99 percent. Much of the within‐group increase in inequality in the bottom 99 percent occurred before 1993, whereas between 1993 and 2000 there continued to be an increase in the income share of the top one percent, and a continuing shift toward the top 0.1 and 0.01 percent groups within the top one percent segment.

And maybe a couple of charts from Gordon’s paper will help:



Pethokoukis’s second bullet point quotes Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis papers by Terry Fitzgerald to say that adjusting for things like declining household sizes, median household income rose 44 percent to 62 percent between 1976 and 2006 and that median hourly wages rose roughly 30 percent (when including non-cash benefits like health care). But Fitzgerald also points out that per capita personal income rose by 80 percent during the same era. What accounts for the difference between median and mean pay? Fitzgerald:

The remaining difference between the 44 percent to 62 percent increase in median household incomes and the 80 percent increase in BEA personal income per person appears to be largely attributable to an increase in income inequality.

That’s Fitzgerald from his 2008 paper. Pethokoukis misses that quote too.

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