Which brings us to the current recovery. In the first three years of the current expansion, incomes actually fell for the bottom 90 percent of earners, even as they rose nicely for the top 10 percent. The result: The top 10 percent captured an impossible-seeming 116 percent of income gains during that span.
But one consistent finding of research into inequality is that merely cutting things off at the top 5 or 10 percent of earners doesn’t capture all of what is changing in patterns of wealth and earnings. So Ms. Tcherneva also compiled the same data for those in the top 1 percent. (The cutoff there, according to the I.R.S., is $388,905 in 2011 adjusted gross income).
This pattern is, in its way, all the more striking. One percent of the population, in the first three years of the current expansion, took home 95 percent of the income gains.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-economic-expansions-are-increasingly-going-to-th
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