Earnings inequality continuing growth in the pandemic labor market

Inequality in annual earnings worsens in 2021.” This report is a couple of weeks old. Still relevant and supports what NDd has been saying as well as others here at Angry Bear. This is taken from EPI. Partial read of a larger report.

Details from year twenty-one finds annual wages rising the fastest for the top 1% of earners (up 9.4%) and top 0.1% (up 18.5%) Those in the bottom 90% saw their real earnings fall 0.2% between 2020 and 2021. Workers in the 90th–99th percentile of the earnings distribution also experienced real losses in 2021.

Top 1% in 1979 and 2021.

The top 1% earned 14.6% of all wages in 2021—twice as high as their 7.3% share in 1979. The bottom 90% received just 58.6% of all wages in 2021, the lowest share on record, and far lower than their 69.8% share in 1979.

From 1979 to 2021;

Wages for the top 1% and top 0.1% skyrocketed by 206.3% and 465.1%, respectively, while wages for the bottom 90% grew just 28.7%.

On an annualized basis, bottom 90% wages grew only 0.6% per year, compared with 2.7% and 4.2% annualized wage growth for the top 1% and top 0.1%, respectively.

Inequality in annual earnings worsens in 2021: Top 1% of earners get larger share of the earnings pie. Bottom 90% lose ground,” Economic Policy Institute, (epi.org), Elise Gould and Jori Kandra