US top income share rose 636 percent while bottom wages stagnated since 1980

Evidence

Alston’s 2018 report on extreme poverty and human rights in the United States offers a stark snapshot of the impact of decades of neoliberalism in one of its key heartlands. Despite the great wealth of the United States, he reported that around 40 million of its citizens lived in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million in ‘Third-World conditions of poverty’. Meanwhile, in the period since 1980, annual income earnings of the top 0.001 per cent of the population had risen by 636 per cent, while the average annual wage for the bottom 50 per cent had stagnated. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 454

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: the US as a case study showing neoliberalism’s poverty effects are not a Global South export but a homegrown heartland outcome.
• XREF: Connects to Piketty’s Capital volume on top income shares and to the reader’s human-rights discourse reading list — Alston’s special rapporteur reports as a key primary source. — connects to: US income inequality roughly doubled between 1980 and 2007. — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 59; Sixty-five percent of recent US income growth went to the top one percent — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 655; The top one percent’s income share more than doubled from 1975 to 2005 — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 916