Earlier I blogged about a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on income inequality that had a small passage on the inequality of doctors' income growth. I've got a little pet peeve to get off my chest. Income and wealth are related, but they are not the same. Income is a flow. Wealth is a stock. But whoever wrote this piece has the two confused:
Now climb up the income ladder to the top 1 percent of households. There, says the center's Aviva Aron-Dine, real income shot up 57 percent in the same period.
Climb higher. For the top 0.1 percent — where incomes average about $4.5 million a year — the jump was 85 percent. For the top .01 percent, 112 percent.
"The increasing gulf between the rich and super rich is a reflection of the greater chasm throughout society," says Aron-Dine. "What's going on is an increasingly skewed assessment of wage and income over the long term."
With higher levels of income, people can build more wealth. But wealth and income are not the same thing.