A better way to show income inequality

Letters to the Editor

Your Visual Guide to Income Inequality is interesting enough, as far as it goes. But the U.S. economic system is better exemplified by David Chandler’s L Curve, at this URL: http://www.lcurve.org/

By using a stack of $100 bills as the income measure and a football field to indicate the array of U.S. incomes from lowest to highest, the size of the stack on the far right hand side of the graph—and the difference in the relative size of the stacks even between the top 1 percent and the top one tenth of one percent—is made splendidly apparent to all.

A series of these football fields dated every five years going back to the 1940s would bring the income divergence picture into sharp focus.

While I applaud your effort to find new and better ways to show folks reality, I see no cause to reinvent this particular wheel.

Edward Ericson Jr. (Joppa, Maryland)

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