rich poor gap
the rich poor gap is notoriously difficult to measure. actually it's not. there are many many ways to measure it. which i think is the difficulty. ie there's lots of opportunity for argument. which abounds when one tries to discuss the fairness of wealth distribution. so i'm going to pick one. if you don't like this metric use whichever one you do like in your own damn blog. sheehs. anywho, consider the ratio between the average income of the top 10% of wage earners to the average income of the bottom 90%. this number has historically bounced around between 5 and 8. in general, low ratio times have been what we call good. and high ratio times bad. most of the past 100 years have been in the 5-6 range. with two notable exceptions where this wealth inequality measure spiked over a few years: to 7.8 in 1929, and to 7.9 today.