Did the wealth of the poorest people rise proportionally as well? I would bet not. We are an era of extreme wealth inequality and it's clearly horrible for society.
In the US, unions had a good year, but 43% pay raises in union contracts were mostly unheard of, so that part of the population probably isn't keeping up.
I wouldn't be surprised if wages in the parts of the global population that's currently industrializing (parts of China and India) went up by way more than 43% though.
One thing I've realized in recent years (thanks to silicon valley stock options): It's not that hard to get into a >99% income bracket for a year or two. You basically just need to participate in an IPO-style windfall, and maybe split it over two tax years. However, staying in that bracket is much harder; you need to have a windfall every year (so, be a successful VC) or be an executive.
For that reason, I'd be interested to see income percentile statistics broken out over a 10 year period vs. annually. Some people summarize this effect with the acronym HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet).
> You basically just need to participate in an IPO-style windfall, and maybe split it over two tax years.
I realize we're on HN, but... calling that not hard feels out of touch. By definition it's extremely rare.
I guess if you mean, an individual who's gotten into that rare position doesn't need to struggle particularly hard to see the fruits, the comment makes sense. Is that it?
'average' people might see it in a year with an inheritance. That was me two years ago. It was a finanically interesting time before the money got placed in more safe places than the checking account.
By the same token, it's not hard for a person to be worth $1M+...steady long-term investment in a 401k over the course of your career can get you there.
But it's _unavailable_ to the average person. They'll get taxed brutally if they touch it, and when managed correctly, will be divvyd out over the course of their retirement...so having 1M doesn't mean it's liquid.
I haven't researched the actual numbers...but isn't that kind of sad?
We may get two more, not near as sizable as the last one...and if we manage things right, my kids will get some, too.
It doesn't take hardly any money at all if you start early enough. $100 a month becomes $320k at retirement. (yes, handwavey tax implications, but still, 100 a month at 7% for 44 years is $320k)
It is only rare in a particular year. If a given person is assumed to only earn that for 1-2 years of a 30+ year career, then 10-20% of all people will be a top 1% earner, by rough math. Still rare, but not nearly as uncommon when looked at that way, if you take the hypothesis that it is commonly a one-time event.
If your math adds up, (and it might but I'm not following it at all) -- 10% is still kind of rare. But yeah, not extremely so. For example, I consider myself pretty good at what I do, but I'd likely have to work very hard (for me) to get in that position. My circumstances don't put me anywhere near it.
I would guess that in any given year a large chunk of the top 1% income earners were also top 1% income earners in other years. The median top 1% income earner, when calculated by the total number of living people who have ever had a top 1% income, may be a person who is only such an earner for 1-2 years. But it's fairly straightforward to see that this median can be reached while the majority of top 1% income earners in any given year are those who have been, or will be, top 1% earners in other years.
Basically, for a 30 year period, if a grand total of 5% of the populace will earn a top 1% income in their life, you could have 0.5% earning a top 1% income for the majority of their lives (so using up half of the top 1% slots). Another 0.9% earning a top 1% income for an average of 10 years of their lives (using up an additional 30% of the top 1% slots). And in the 30 year period this would leave only 1/5th of the top 1% slots open to the remaining 3.6%, who would have an average of 1.6 years each of being a top 1% income earner. Any spare slots would go to lottery winners.
Just to throw a concrete number on this, extrapolating from Wikipedia, about $350k family income will put you above the 1% mark. I assume IPO-windfall would be considerably higher than that and maybe be at least top 0.1% that year ($2M+), which would be a different discussion.
So, mathematically, the number must lie between 1% and 30% that will be in the top 1% over a 30 year career. The question that remains is where in that range, which gives a measure of economic mobility for a country.
You do realize that the vast vast majority of the population never have an IPO-style windfall in a 30+ year career, don’t you? Are we witnessing some sort of fake out-of-touchness as humble brag here?
Yeah, I've been a software engineer for almost 20 years and I've never had an 'IPO-style windfall' (and don't see how that's going to happen in the next ten years either, unless I join a unicorn startup). Closest I've ever gotten to that is a $10k bonus one year. That definitely doesn't count.
I've been an early employee at two startups also, they just didn't pan out.
If I don't get that in one of the more well-paid professions, then I don't see how a teacher, or a janitor, or a waitress, etc, would ever get one.
This has been my experience too as a software engineer with about 8 years of experience under my belt. A massive windfall like that simply isn't in the cards for me and even being fairly well compensated saving a majority of my money I don't see homeownership in my future.
That's been increasingly the experience of friends and coworkers too. I think a fair number of people are either far better off than they think, or just don't see the huge middle class and below squeeze going on.
> If I don't get that in one of the more well-paid professions, then I don't see how a teacher, or a janitor, or a waitress, etc, would ever get one.
Yeah I was entirely limiting the population discussed to SWE as well. Anybody who doesn't work in a core tech role has no chance whatsoever of such windfall, and that includes many people who do work in tech roles.
Not a unicorn. Just be an early member of a company that gets to IPO. You do have to risk more to attempt that, and maybe do it more than once, but it's a question of appetite for risk and a slightly lower work-life balance. It's definitely not unattainable.
> I wouldn't be surprised if wages in the parts of the global population that's currently industrializing (parts of China and India) went up by way more than 43% though.
"The average salary increase in India is likely to be 10% in 2023, up from an actual increase of 9.8% in 2022" [1]
China's was in the range 3.7 percent, with salaries now a double of what they were a decade ago [2].
And that's in the formal economy in India, which employs a small fraction of those employed.
I found this mini-documentary by Polymatter[1] interesting. It asserts that Indian firms with ten or more employees are subject to inspections by the Indian labour inspectorate and a bunch of other requirements. For entirely unrelated reasons most Indian firms find 9 to be the optimum number of employees.
Here in India, the income disparity is becoming near comical. Mid level management at bloated unprofitable startups are making 40-50x the annual income of a maid.
Condos in Delhi regularly sell for half a million dollars and higher.
Meanwhile the government had to extend a free food scheme for 800M people by another 5 years and reduce the price of cooking fuel by 40% because the majority can’t afford to eat.
The government has kept that at bay so far with welfare schemes, religion, and nationalist propaganda. Don't know how sustainable that is. There is massive flight of talent already.
Even as someone who makes good money, increasingly starting to feel that any semblance of a "good life" is unaffordable here. The discourse among my friends - all well-paid mid-career professionals - was that it's often cheaper to fly out to a country like Thailand and stay in a good resort, than to have a holiday in India.
I’m not following your two sentiments. With high income disparity, isn’t it extremely cheap for high earners to go on holiday? Where I assume the restaurant and hotel staff are paid poorly?
Incomes have risen so sharply for high earners that the supply for hotels, cabs, flights hasn’t kept pace with demand from this segment. Hence the unaffordability.
> However, staying in that bracket is much harder; you need to have a windfall every year (so, be a successful VC) or be an executive.
That's a good point. When people talk about "the 1%" or "the wealthiest families", they take the group that would qualify to be in that ranking today, and compare them with a different group from the past. But they're not the same people. You really need to do a longitudinal study. Take the same people and see how their wealth has grown.
For instance, take the richest person from the 1980s
Yoshiaki Tsutsumi dominated the richest list in the 1980s thanks to his real estate empire. However, times soon changed for Tsutsumi when real estate values tanked in the 1990s and he was caught up in an accounting scandal in the early 2000s. As of 2006, he dropped off the list of the wealthiest people in the world.
Today he's worth 500 million.
To make it that wealthy you generally have to take highly concentrated risks or be extremely leveraged. And this rarely lasts.
You have to keep delivering extreme amounts of value for decades, which is not easy. Much simpler (relatively speaking) to make a few million and retire.
> It's not that hard to get into a >99% income bracket for a year or two.
The 99th percentile threshold for household income in 2023 was "only" $591,550.
A two-earner couple who sells a house beyond the exclusion amount (or is not eligible for the exclusion) would pretty readily brush into the 99th percentile for that year. (Many zero-earner couples would get there just from a house sale.)
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "one year" 99th percentile folks were there just from a house sale and then someone else takes that spot in subsequent years.
Are primary residence sales, which typically involve moving to another residence, considered "income" for the purposes discussed here? If they are, based on what I'm reading elsewhere, this would only be relative to the capital gains on the sale price relative to the purchase price.
Capital gains (for primary houses, those gains above the exclusion amount) contribute towards AGI (adjusted gross income), the best single summary line of income on the return.
Sure, gains above both the exclusion amount and the purchase price. But even when added to other sources of income that's going to yield a 1% income for very few people.
It will obviously be less than 1% of people overall.
Among the “got into the top 1% once” group, I think it’s possibly a majority of those cases.
Capital gains are roughly “net sales price minus basis”. Whatever the mortgage was has no bearing on it. (Someone who pays down their mortgage aggressively will not have more gains by that action, nor will someone who continually refi’s with cash-out have fewer gains.)
Edit: parent edited their comment to remove a question about how gains are calculated and how that interacted with mortgage payoff.
The report is that net worth (not income) of the wealthiest rose 42%.
Wages would tend to be a fraction of wealth for those on middle incomes, say, who have been in work for more than a few years. They will have payed the majority of their wages for years into acquiring a place to live.
In the Uk my house would now cost 8x my wage, a wage increase of 43% (for one year) would increase my net worth by about a sixteenth (~6%).
Inflation is 10% (not 42%) and my employer capped wage maintenance at 8%.
> For that reason, I'd be interested to see income percentile statistics broken out over a 10 year period vs. annually. Some people summarize this effect with the acronym HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet).
Heh, most of the world would kill just to experience that for one year in their life.
One has to be extremely out of touch to think wages could rise "by way more than 43%" in a year over a reasonably large region anywhere in the world, unless it's a dirt poor and sparsely populated agricultural region that literally struck gold that year. (Not counting hyperinflation, obviously.)
> In the US, unions had a good year, but 43% pay raises in union contracts were mostly unheard of, so that part of the population probably isn't keeping up.
There's a difference between wealth and income though. It's entirely possible 10% pay raises yield >43% increases in wealth, so long as most of the original wage wasn't able to go in to savings/investment.
> It's not that hard to get into a >99% income bracket for a year or two. You basically just need to participate in an IPO-style windfall, and maybe split it over two tax years.
It's actually much easier than that: you just have to win the lottery. Easy! I mean, why doesn't everyone do that? Are they stupid?
> In the US, unions had a good year, but 43% pay raises in union contracts were mostly unheard of, so that part of the population probably isn't keeping up.
Do you have any statistics for that claim? In Sweden the largest union negotiated salary increases of 7.4% over two years (https://www.unionen.se/opinion/ja-till-avtal-nu-har-vi-ett-m...) which is far below the rate of inflation. In other words most workers are experiencing pay cuts, not increases. It would be surprising if the situation was completely different in the US.
Any highly competitive market for workers (e.g. silicon valley software developers) is going to be much better for wages than a union, and even they won't generally make 43% more YOY.
> I wouldn't be surprised if wages in the parts of the global population that's currently industrializing (parts of China and India) went up by way more than 43% though
What an insanely out-of-touch take. HN-ers really are something else.
You’re completely missing the forest for the trees.
The richer are getting ever richer, with everyone else stagnating or regressing. Last time inegality was this high gave birth to the concept of a union, to the creation of communism, etc.
If you’re a capitalist who despises progressive ideals, you should be wary right now. The very rich are so rich they’re grabbing all the gains with nothing for anyone else.
Wages are definitely up, but if you factor in all the price increases of rent and groceries, I don't see how anything is better for the poorest. I've seen fast food places here hiring @ $20-25 an hour - that would maybe be enough to buy a 1 bedroom condo 4 years ago in less expensive areas, but you certainly can't on that salary now, not at current mortgage rates anyway. So they're basically in the same place it seems.
And if we're strictly speaking about the poorest - they also don't have a 401k or retirement savings, so they aren't benefiting from the increase in asset prices.
> Between 2019 and 2022, low-wage workers experienced historically fast real wage growth. The 10th percentile real hourly wage grew 9.0% over the three-year period. This tremendous real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution was exceptional, significantly faster than in any other business cycle peak since 1979.
Adjusted for the inflation on the items that the poorest tend to spend their money on? The inflation statistics I've seen have a few buckets for certain kinds of expenses, but don't break things down into baskets of goods based on income.
: As there are no official estimates of inflation by demographic and income groups
: In the first post of this series, we present disparities in inflation rates across racial and ethnic groups as well as across income groups between June 2019 and December 2022. We present evidence that during this period, Black, Hispanic, and middle-income households were most affected by rising inflation, experiencing steadily higher price increases relative to the overall average between early 2021 and June 2022. This pattern is largely because a greater share of these groups’ expenditures is devoted to transportation, particularly used cars and motor fuel, categories that led the 2021 inflationary episode. However, over the last five months, as transportation inflation has declined, these gaps have declined as well.
: It is likely the case that the same rate of inflation represents a greater welfare loss for lower-income than higher-income households because of the former’s lower capacity for substituting to less expensive goods, greater liquidity constraints, and larger marginal utility of real income.
Well no, inflation-adjustment is inherently naïve. It assumes that everything rises at the same rate of inflation, which is obviously not true. Rent has surged far faster than inflation for example.
> inflation-adjustment is inherently naïve. It assumes that everything rises at the same rate of inflation
It doesn't. "Real wages" are adjusted to changes in CPI. It makes no assertions that everything inflates at the same pace, any more than the overall CPI figure does the same.
If your wages went up 20%, and the CPI went up by 10% (composed of, say, a 40% rise in rent and some commensurate declines in other goods and services), your real wages went up by 10%. Of course, how that impacts actual individuals is different based on their circumstances.
The problem is that CPI does not accurately reflect true inflation. If you chart wage growth to M2, you see it hasn't' kept up, and you also can see that assets have outpaced inflation quite a bit.
> Wages are definitely up, but if you factor in all the price increases of rent and groceries, I don't see how anything is better for the poorest
Well yes - rent is driven up by more people being around, and groceries by wages and fuel going up. As for fast food jobs - if a fast food job can get you a place to live by yourself that's amazing, but surely that's going to be harder and harder to find as demand stays high and the number of 2-income families, who can just out-bid you easily, also is high.
Other dynamics, like inflation and gentrification to name a couple, can make Situation 1 basically the same in practice to Situation 2. It just makes it more difficult to point out because "everyone's money number has gone up, so the system works!"
There is no universe in which the poorest get the same economic benefits as the rich. If the rich saw that happening, they would label it a "market inefficiency" and make it go away (to their benefit, of course).
I don't think so. They'd just figure out a way to do the same thing, or leverage it, or make a business that makes it easier for those people to take advantage of that rule in exchange for a small fee!
The poorest people are likely living on the streets. It's a different problem problem, as they may well not be engaging in the economy at all. So it's a bit of a silly comparison.
Would you be willing to articulate why wealth inequality is bad for society? I am fairly certain that wealth inequality globally is higher than it was in 2000. At the same time, well the poorest globally are doing much much better on average.
In my mindset as long as the median is improving and the poorest are improving, the ratio of rich to poor isn't important and isn't clearing a bad thing if the inequality is increasing. You seem to think otherwise, why?
Inequality is usually measured by Gini index and a quick search will indeed tell you that inequality rose since 2000 in USA.
Inequality gives rise to populism and extremism all the way up to civil unrest. If the middle class ignores the woes of poor it is swept by revolution aimed at rich.
Inequality is like an infection, weakening the immune system and allowing owners of the press, politicians, and agitators to spread populist ideas that would otherwise be laughed off.
Inequality makes possible our current situation, where the owning class encourage and exploit immigrant labour, only to disseminate "news" aimed at making the working class hate those immigrants.
There's definitely a factor of diverting the anger from the class issue to race and cultural wars. But happy, well off people wouldn't be angry in the first place.
Same story as in plantation times: Make the white servants feel superior to black slaves by virtue of skin color; manipulate poor whites into believing that any perceived gains by blacks had come at their expense.
Our material wealth in the US is way way higher than it was in 1900 but people aren't happier. I don't think I agree that well of people would stop being happy. Unless you want to define well off in relative instead of absolute terms.
Look, you might start getting the inequality concept.
Although the absolute wealth of poor might have improved since 1900, people can still be angry that someone is extracting disproportionate amount from the system while their situation is stagnating. See flatlined real wages since 1970s
The problem is also that people want class warfare. Not just that it sometimes sublimates into other tribalisms. And all of this is regularly taught in universities, so I don't think it just arises due to "inequality".
My point was that this anger itself seems rooted in media and agitation / political movements. Anger (= news headlines) sells news subscriptions, anger sells votes (or something).
Like many pointed out here, this "43%" was nothing special this year if, for example, you are mid-career and have moderately aggressive stock market participation. It's an example of headline entirely cooked up for agitation.
For another counterpoint, I'm certainly angry about things. You are welcome to count me as angry. But do NOT count me as angry because of inequality. Inequality is a distraction and cause celebre useful to distract people. Rather it's the gross inefficiency and ludicrous aims of the current system (= two parties and press and government) which make me angry. And that has nothing to do with inequalities.
I know US history education isn't greatest but you might have heard about French revolution, rise of Nazism or various communism uprisings, Mexican revolution in 1910s.
With better outcomes for society: labor movement at the turn of century and in 30s.
French revolution for one was not about income inequality per se. It doesn't seem the idea itself was in people's mind - and too many other issues instead.
If the French revolution wasn't about income inequality then there has never been a conflict about inequality... Read the Rosseau and Voltaire of the period leading up to the crises. You can feel their passion when they talk about inequality.
"The rioters had already availed themselves of the stores of the Hôtel de Ville, but they remained unsatisfied: they wanted not just one meal but the assurance that bread would once again be plentiful and cheap. Famine was a real and ever-present dread for the lower strata of the Third Estate, and rumors of an "aristocrats' plot" to starve the poor were rampant and readily believed.[2]"
Not about income equality per se, but you know, not wanting to starve in the streets. Lol what the fuck.
I think it's a big stretch to point to all of those and say wealth inequality is the main reason all of those happen. For example, people were starving around the French revolution. With Germany I believe it was just as much (if not more) general depression and national embarrassment rather than wealth inequality. With Arab Spring you can point to poor leadership as opposed to innate wealth inequality. I'm not convinced wealth inequality is the underlying reason.
Just open Wikipedia man. It has citations to primary sources.
"Although the 18th century was a period of increasing prosperity, the benefits were distributed unevenly across regions and social groups. Those whose income derived from agriculture, rents, interest and trade in goods from France's slave colonies benefited most, while the living standards of wage labourers and farmers on rented land fell."
Same for Arab spring, it's like second sentence on the wiki. It's also heavily about corruption, but guess what, those two go hand in hand. Open maps for corruption and Gini index and you will see strong correlation.
Of course there are more reasons. Society is complex.
You're quite right that while the rich have gotten richer the poor have gotten richer too, just to a lesser extent. But it doesn't mean the poor are better off in every way. That's only true if we look purely at monetary wealth/purchasing power. But because we live in a society that gives a bigger voice to people with money, many people who are relatively poor can feel increasingly disconnected from a feeling of being an active participant in society.
The issues are broad and subtle with wealth inequality, too much for the scope of an HN comment, but I would posit that inequality issue are about more than access to goods.
Thanks for taking the time to have a thoughtful reply.
I think pointing to wealth inequality as the reason there is increasing disconnection is a stretch. Yes it's a factor but I don't think it's the chief one.
Do you have a pointer to a resource that covers some of the more broad and subtle issues with wealth inequality?
> I think pointing to wealth inequality as the reason there is increasing disconnection is a stretch.
I think it is the chief one. Every time I have seen it suggested that it is some other thing — you don't have to peel but a few layers and find money in fact behind that other thing.
> Would you be willing to articulate why wealth inequality is bad for society? I am fairly certain that wealth inequality globally is higher than it was in 2000. At the same time, well the poorest globally are doing much much better on average.
Wealth inequality is an issue largely borne out within a particular society.
In the UK we've seen rising poverty and food insecurity at the same time as a rapid increase in the wealth of those at the top. That global poverty has improved means little to someone who is now struggling to put food on their table, or stay on top of their mortgage.
> In my mindset as long as the median is improving and the poorest are improving, the ratio of rich to poor isn't important and isn't clearing a bad thing if the inequality is increasing. You seem to think otherwise, why?
Wealth buys power. Allowing it to concentrate into a small group of people leads to issues.
Social cohesion seems to suffer as inequality rises.
> Social cohesion seems to suffer as inequality rises.
I don't think there is any seems about it. I'm quite confident that social cohesion/solidarity is poorer in the UK now than it was fifty years ago and considerably worse than here in Norway where we have more compressed income and wealth ranges.
FWIW I agree personally. I find that stating a position too strongly sometimes leads to a debate about semantics rather than the merit of the explanation/justification.
My opinion is that inequality destroys people's ability to relate to one another. My worries now are completely different to those I had growing up, and the people who have staff to run their lives increasingly show themselves to have no concept of what life is like for the rest of us.
It feels like there's a fairly dangerous game being played in the UK at the minute, with frustrations around inequality are being exploited and redirected as anger towards out-groups.
The issue is that leaving the EU and attacking immigrants doesn't actually solve the underlying issue. The people behind it still benefit in the meantime but eventually it's going to blow up in someone's face. My sincerest hope is that it's theirs.
Rising wealth inequality grants power disproportionately to the wealthy. Money is power, the means to make your view stick. And guess what, people with money want to hang on to it and the life it gives them so they promote ideas and behaviours that help them do that regardless of whether this is good or bad for everyone else.
I was just reading (from HN recently) about when, in the Nineteenth Century, I believe) England did away with trust perpetuity. It destroyed the dynastic family wealth but instead kicked off the greatest entrepreneurial expansion the country had ever seen.
Even if the poor fared a little better we cannot say if they would not have fared even better still had we less of a wealth divide.
19th century England was the height of the Industrial Revolution. Trust perpetuity probably had no effect on entrepreneurial expansion, especially considering that the aristocrats who were the primary beneficiaries of these dynastic trusts weren't the people who were engaging in entrepreneurship to begin with.
increase in money supply helps people who are using debt to leverage into assets. Most large companies do this to some extent, and the upper middle class and rich people are heavily invested into equities.
People who are not levered into assets are worse off after an increase in money supply.
Deficit spending necessitates increasing M2, and in turn is a wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the rich.
I think it is more the consequence of intervention than not sharing wealth.
I do not have evidence but there are lots of regulations, talking about Spain now, but also in Europe, that leave small players de-facto out by apparently good intentions and make big players almost monopolize markets. Banking system, energy are two examples in Spain but there are lots of small business that get smashed by the fact that by not being profitable enough, causing them economic damage makes them extinguish. Lots of small business have been shutting down in the last few years yet they keep increasing tax rates. Special mention to freelancers, the most mercilessly smashed group here, taking into account that you often cannot control what is coming in the next few months wealth-wise, since that is relatively irregular and self-sustained.
The system is built in harmful ways for most of us.
> It is mostly not smashing people with regulations that do not let them even compete in fair conditions.
But making regulations is much easier if you’re very wealthy, so you advocate for regulations that keep you wealthy with a very expensive loud voice and that creates a pretty strong feedback cycle.
One way out (seems to me) is chopping the top off the wealth curve and redistributing - it might matter less that poorer folks are getting money and more that extremely wealthy folks have less insanely disproportionate power to make a world that suits only them.
In my mind chopping off is just stealing. It also kills incentives to invest and improve, which has negative effects in prices, employment...
Deregulation is what allows people to enter markets. Regulation is what puts barriers.
There are plenty of times where regulations are just plain absurd and what they contribute to is to kick out smaller players from the market without any real improvement. It also forces consumers to buy more expensive because the market is more monopolized. Safety is the typical excuse. Sometimes it could make some sense but sometimes is just plain cheating.
I would let people choose carefully and have ALL the information clear (must be really dilligent about this in laws) about what they are buying or not, contracting or not and let the market decide what those levels of quality for each service are and the value they have.
My wealth rose by 100% last year, as I was saving throughout the year from near zero while matching these returns with low fee ETFs everyone has access to.
I personally believe many of these dynasties do have some unfair and systematic advantages, but this article doesn’t have evidence to support that conclusion.
If you don't have money to put into an ETF, you don't have access to it. "Just invest your money" is not a helpful response to people who live paycheck to paycheck.
Most wealth is the integral of a function based off of predicted future profits and predicted interest rates. It's naturally going to be highly volatile compared to people's wages or home values.
no, they didn’t have any savings to begin with and everything they bought depreciates in value
it was actually very cumbersome for me to find people that knew anything else, when I was younger everyone I was around only prided themselves in buying depreciating material things. I’m aware of how pervasive that mentality can be, could be considered a distinct culture.
I wouldn't be surprised if wages in the parts of the global population that's currently industrializing (parts of China and India) went up by way more than 43% though.
One thing I've realized in recent years (thanks to silicon valley stock options): It's not that hard to get into a >99% income bracket for a year or two. You basically just need to participate in an IPO-style windfall, and maybe split it over two tax years. However, staying in that bracket is much harder; you need to have a windfall every year (so, be a successful VC) or be an executive.
For that reason, I'd be interested to see income percentile statistics broken out over a 10 year period vs. annually. Some people summarize this effect with the acronym HENRY (High Earner, Not Rich Yet).