This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
I think that’s the whole point. It’s not trying to paint an overview of the economy, but rather to show what portion a typical member of each class gets to live off of.
Images like you describe that show the breakdown for each entire class? Those are not hard to find.
I just don’t think it’s an honest way to show the data. You could use the exact same method but put the richest individual as one group and the entire rest of humanity as another group and show that the top 1 person gets the entire pizza except for one microscopic crumb but of course that would be extremely misleading. I’m fine with per Capita wealth per wealth group as a metric but it doesn’t lend itself to be used in circular graphs. A bar graph would be less misleading. But of course that wouldn’t be good in a comic. I’m also against extreme wealth inequality but we are not going to solve it by misrepresenting the data. The non misrepresented data is already telling enough.
There’s 4 people in the image. If the 4 of them split a pizza based on their wealth, this is what each would get. How is that misleading?
1: I think the average reader of this comic won’t understand it correctly without thinking deeply about how “per capita” affects the size of the pizza slices compared to a non per capita version.
2: Looking at this graph one would think that the entire problem with wealth inequality lies with the top 1%. However the next top 9% own more wealth combined than the top 1% do. This comic represents the “merely wealthy” as a victim but I would argue the opposite. To even enter the top 10% category you need over 2.5 million dollars. Top 5% is almost 5 million dollars. They get an unfairly large slice of the pie too.
The top x% owning y% of combined wealth is a standard measure of wealth inequality. This is literally what the Lorenz curve describes and the basis for the well-known Gini coefficient.
That being said, the proportions in the comic aren’t really in line with the figures I know. Wealth inequality is increasing in the US, but the wealth share of the top 1% currently is more like 33% (still bad but far away from the pizza example).
This cartoon does not use “top x% owning y% of combined wealth”. It uses a per capita version which is very different from what you’re talking about. And that’s my entire point.
Gotcha, I was wondering what the “per capita” meant and saw it explained in a different comment. In that case, I agree that this is misleading.
Yo know who I expect to have the most scrutinized data? Cartoons.
Dr. W. E. Coyote PhD, now that was a scientist with some goddamn tegrity!