It’s too bad that The Atlantic has not yet posted Megan McArdle‘s article about the recent 10-year reunion of her University of Chicago business school class. It’s an entertaining read, and it offers an important point about the “1 percent.”
[T]he entry point (as of 2009) for the top 1 percent is $343,927 a year. (In Washington, but not in Chicago, this is what passes for amusing cocktail chatter.)
However, those of us who left finance can take heart, because we are a lot closer to the top 1 percent than we used to be. In 2007, the entry point was $410,096. The top 1 percent’s share of national income has also dropped recently, as the finance professor Steven Kaplan pointed out when I ran into him. In fact, for all the fanfare greeting recent studies by the Congressional Budget Office on rising income inequality from 1979 to 2007, according to Kaplan’s calculations, between 2007 and 2009 the share of adjusted gross income that went to the top 1 percent dropped from 23.5 percent to 17.6 percent — the largest two-year drop since 1928-30. …
… Income inequality usually falls during recessions: top incomes are more tightly linked to volatile capital gains and corporate profits.
