Thomas Piketty Is Right Everything you need to know about ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’
Piketty likes to describe the distribution of income and wealth concretely, and not in terms of summary statistics. He looks at the proportions of the total claimed by the top 1 percent (sometimes also the top tenth of the 1 percent), the top 10 percent, the next 40 percent, and the bottom half. (He labels the 40 percent between the top decile and the median as the “middle class.” There is an element of oxymoron in a middle class that lies entirely above the median; but I suppose this usage is no worse than the American habit of describing everyone between the clearly rich and the abjectly poor as being in the middle class.)
.. About 60 percent of the income of the top 1 percent in the United States today is labor income. Only when you get to the top tenth of 1 percent does income from capital start to predominate.
.. The recent surge of extreme inequality at the top of the wage distribution may be primarily an American development. Piketty, who with Emmanuel Saez has made a careful study of high-income tax returns in the United States, attributes this to the rise of what he calls “supermanagers.” The very highest income class consists to a substantial extent of top executives of large corporations, with very rich compensation packages.