# Increasing Income Inequality If people today were paid as fairly as they were in 1950, we would only have to work about 11 hours a week. If you look up the inflation adjusted GDP per capita in 1950, it was $15,100 per year per person. The economy produced only $15,100 in today's dollars per person in the country. If you look up the GDP per capita in 2020, it was $55,700 per person. If the economy's output was distributed 100% equally, every single person in the country could make almost sixty thousand dollars a year. ![A graph of GDP per capita from 1960 to 2020. It was less than $20,000 in 1960, and greater than $50,000 in 2020.](https://i.imgur.com/BqPkXCZ.png) If you divide the 2020 figure by the 1950 figure, you get a factor of 3.68. Our economy today produces almost four times as much wealth per person than in 1950. If you divide a 40 hour work week by 3.68, you get a bit less than 11 hours. This means that people today work for the same hours, just to get 27% of the cut that they used to. We're still working for subsistence despite how much more productivity our economy has gained from automation and other technology. If you want to know where the other 73% of the money is going, I'd just like to point out that the bottom 50% of Americans, as a group, only has 1% of the wealth in the country. The entire bottom half of this country is living on scraps. The top 1% of the country has 25% of the wealth of the country. This means the average 1%er has 1,250 times more wealth than the average bottom 50%er. That doesn't give us much room to breath. ![The slice of wealth that the bottom 50% holds has gone down significantly since 1988. The top 1%'s slice has increased significantly, however.](https://i.imgur.com/Vjv28un.png) # Sources [The bottom 50% of Americans now have 1% of America's wealth](https://www.axios.com/wealth-gap-united-states-bottom-50-top-1-percent-b89062ea-58fe-4f8c-853a-ad212a215330.html) [Wolfram Alpha: "(us real yearly gdp 2020 / us population 2020) / (us real yearly gdp 1950 / us population 1950)"](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28us+real+yearly+gdp+2020+%2F+us+population+2020%29+%2F+%28us+real+yearly+gdp+1950+%2F+us+population+1950%29) [Wolfram Alpha: "us real yearly gdp 1950 / us population 1950"](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+real+yearly+gdp+1950+%2F+us+population+1950) [Wolfram Alpha: "us real yearly gdp 2020 / us population 2020"](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+real+yearly+gdp+2020+%2F+us+population+2020) [Wolfram Alpha: "us real gdp per capita from 1950 to 2020"](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+real+gdp+per+capita+from+1950+to+2020)