Bonus Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on March 11, 2019
… is from page 52 of Alan Reynolds’s excellent 2006 book, Income and Wealth (original emphases):
As a larger percentage of households joined “the ranks of the rich” there were soon “too many rich people” to fit within the top 5 percent or top 20 percent. The bar had to be raised, and that, in turn, has inspired what I call “threshold illusion.” That is, a rising mean income among the top 5-20 percent has been routinely misinterpreted as indicating that income gains were confined to only that top group. In reality, rising incomes among those with incomes below the rising threshold have caused the definition of top income groups to exclude incomes that had formerly been among the top group….
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