For example, if everyone had high personal income and an abundance of space, they'd likely live privately.

Whereas if you've got no income, you risk homelessness, you may live with someone you'd rather not. e.g. bad marriages, domestic violence etc is often tolerated due to a lack of financial power to move out.

As such you may find the median household income overstates wealth. It may be considerable simply because multiple people live there, who are too poor to live by themselves. In this sense, household income may hide poverty and overstates affluence. Particularly when you consider that there's a negative correlation between income and birth rates, you end up seeing large families (and possibly considerable household income) who are poor, in the data. But just reporting on household income doesn't do that justice.

Similarly, this creates an apples/oranges comparison with median/average household income.

The median household in the US today is 2 people. In the 1960s it was 3 people. (close to 4, even!) But it's different from the average household size, which has dropped too. As such, you may just be observing that the median household relative to the average household size has been dropping. That could have nothing to do with polarization, it may just mean there's a shift in living preferences. I'm not asserting anything here, just that there are alternative explanations for the observation you make, and that just looking at these averages without context, controlling for confounding variables or any theoretical basis may lead you to incorrect conclusions.

Feel free to post a better presentation of the data.

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/income-poverty/...

Five minutes or not, it is ultimately deceptive. What really is a ~22% drop since 1970s looks like a 100% drop on first sight.

> terrible choice of axis

> honest scale

> deceptive

Be kind ya'll.

Why would they be? They certainly didn't say they are.

> What you really means is that using an honest scale makes the trend look less dramatic.

I think "honest" is a loaded term here. It's a well known fact that income inequality has been growing in the US for decades now, and the trend is dramatic and undeniable. Are there ways to minimize it visually in a graph? Sure, you could blow out the axes, or you could do yearly deltas which wouldn't have the line moving past a few percent ever. Both of these suggestions would flatten this phenomena, and coincidentally both have been suggested here. But the phenomena itself is not flat, and therefore it is the flat representation that, by definition, would be misleading.

As I said repeatedly, if you don't like the graph, post a better one!

You are missing the point that everyone s situation seems to be improving - the median income is a better metric to measure that.

Hypothetically: what're some solutions that a monied person could implement to stymie the runaway feedback loop? I know it may sound odd but is it possible to use money to stop the purchase of political power for both yourself and everyone else?

Not necessarily - I just like to muse about big-picture problems with society from time to time. Contrasting median and mean income (a flawed measure for various reasons) was just the first idea I had when I was trying to sanity-check the common-sense idea that because it's easier to get money if you already have money, social polarization is likely to grow.

As far as the US is concerned, campaign finance reform often gets mentioned as the most immediate step to improve upon the current situation.

As to the big-picture problems, frankly, I'm not sure humanity as a species is enlightened enough to overcome self-interest and inertia to ever fix the systemic problems present in the current way we organize society. Hope for benevolent robot overlords, I guess ;)

I disagree.

So you have a bit more than you had last year but as time goes on your percetage share in the overall wealth, prosperity and influence in your nation is decreasing.

Great deal.