| spurgeonryan said: I hope to totally understand this by the time this thread gets to 30 posts. Are you saying that across the board everyone is getting poorer? Is that what I got out of the gini coefficient which I have only heard of before in the Homeless thread. |
oooh, no it's nothing like that at all.
The Gini-coefficent is a measurement of income inequality in a country.
The closer the number is to 0, the closer were to everyone earning the same amount of money. (Whether it be high or low is irrelevent.) The closer it is to 1, the more likely it is that 50% of the country own all the wealth, and the other 50% have absolutely zero money.
Essentially the Ginicoefficent between indiduals has shrunk. Which means treating everyone as their own person, fathers and mothers as seperate etc, income inequality has shrunk.
When taken in the context of people living under the same roof, or families, it's grown.
So the current driver in income equality isn't due to the rich getting richer so much as the rich, marrying richer, single parents being on the rise and the rise of the dual income worker.
Although part of the rich are getting richer, really when it comes to income equality the bottom 50% and top 1% are actually both doing well. With the 49% of the top being the ones getting "screwed."
