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A comment on The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent. Parent comment

Re:The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent by twoodfin on Sunday October 14, 2012 @01:37AM (#4650776)
Saez's contribution to economics was a novel way to measure income inequality of really small percentages (top 1%, 0.1% etc.) of the population.

That may be, but income statistics like the one cited here don't require anything novel: The IRS publishes everything you'd need to know.

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Re:The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent by JDShu on Sunday October 14, 2012 @01:54AM (#4650798)
No it doesn't, that's the point. The IRS publishes the top 1% and I believe the top 0.1%, but it does not cover the top 0.01% which you cited.
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Re:The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent by twoodfin on Sunday October 14, 2012 @02:01AM (#4650805)
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/08in12ms.xls

Try dividing the number of $10M+ earners by the total number of taxable returns. You'll get a number surprisingly close to .01%.

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Re:The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent by JDShu on Sunday October 14, 2012 @02:18AM (#4650835)
Yes, what Piketty and Saez did was a more sophisticated operation on IRS data to get a time series so that we can measure exactly how the top 0.01% etc. did.

Here's the link to the paper if you want the details. http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/

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