Changing Income Inequality in The United States

Income inequality in the United States has increased in recent decades, and this has recently become a concern to some economists and others interested in economic and political issues. Lorenz curves for the United States are shown in Figure 12 below.

Figure 12. Lorenz Curves for the United States

The four Lorenz curves are for 1970, 1980, 1990, and 1994, and are color-coded as follows:

Table 5

years	1970	1980	1990	1994
colors	black	green	blue	red
Gini Coefficients	0.394	0.403	0.428	0.456

We observe a steady, and perhaps accelerating, tendency toward increased inequality over this period. This can also be observed when we look at the Gini Coefficients for the four years, shown in the third row of the table. We see that the over-all increase is about sixteen percent, or one-sixth.