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Prosperity And Inequality: Lessons From The United States, Samuel L. Myers Jr

Samuel L Myers Jr

For most of the post-World War II period prior to the 1980s, the distribution of income in the United States remained remarkably stable. Measures of inequality – such as the gap between incomes of those at the top and those at the bottom of the income distribution – showed little change for nearly 40 years (Darity and Myers, 1998, p. 3). In their book, Persistent Disparity, published 10 years ago, Darity and Myers documented a contemporaneous rise in general inequality and the widening of black-white disparities in family incomes. The ratio of black to white family incomes declined from the …