I'd be much more interested in seeing the differences in median wealth (for the population as a whole, and broken down by race/ethnicity), adjusted for inflation.

The term "wealth" refers to "private assets (such as savings and property) minus debts. It is what you own minus what you owe. In other words, it is net assets. Income, on the other hand, refers to wages, salary, interest that you earn, Social Security benefits, etc."

"In the 22 years between 1976 and 1998, the share of the nation's private wealth held by the top 1% nearly doubled, going from 22% to 38%. During those two decades, the size of the overall "wealth pie" grew, but the ownership of that wealth is now more concentrated than at any time since the 1920s."

Source: http://www.osjspm.org/101_wealth.aspx#6

The stats above are kind of dated, but I'd be willing to bet the disparity in wealth between the richest and poorest in America is even more pronounced now.

Here is a measure of the increase of "U.S. median family net worth by percentile of net worth" from 1989 to 2007:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/MedianNet...

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United_States

Wealth distribution isn't the same as wealth though.

I'm not sure what you're getting at by pointing out this obvious difference. Could you elaborate?

You said

"I'd be much more interested in seeing the differences in median wealth (for the population as a whole, and broken down by race/ethnicity), adjusted for inflation."

Which I agree with wholeheartedly.

But then to my disappointment, you posted information about wealth distribution rather than median wealth.

I got the impression you were saying that wealth distribution says something about median wealth. I don't think it does.

The wikipedia links were good though, so thanks.

Knowing a distribution, you know its median. Even if you just know the weight in a quantile (e.g. X% of wealth is in the hands of the top Y% of people), then you can upper bound the median wealth once you know per-capita wealth. And if you're willing to make some assumption about the general shape of the distribution, knowing it tells you even more.

Your original comment is about relative wealth. Therefore, I think his point is that your original comment is irrelevant in the context of a 6x increase in wealth.

Are they using the same methods for GDP in both time periods? I doubt it.

Per capita is not a great metric, especially since GDP is not distributed per capita across the country, and there are many ways of measuring GDP.

Even bad metrics can be better than nothing, and they can also be worse than nothing, but if you're going to quantify it, GDP is probably the only way to go. Based on my limited knowledge of 1930, I'd still much rather be living in 2011. Maybe not 6x, but at least 1.5x more. Back then they didn't even have Turing machines down on paper, much less actual physical hardware...

There's more than one way to use GDP. I think that, for describing standard of living, median GDP would be better than average GDP (= GDP per capita).

Averages are sensitive to outlier performance. This is important when the distribution follows a power law, as in the case of wealth distribution.