{"id":14,"date":"2025-04-29T10:55:27","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T14:55:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.bsu.edu\/econbriefs\/?p=14"},"modified":"2025-04-29T10:55:27","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T14:55:27","slug":"data-shows-rich-outpace-poor-in-income-growth-by-dr-cecil-bohanon-and-dr-john-horowitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.bsu.edu\/econbriefs\/2025\/04\/29\/data-shows-rich-outpace-poor-in-income-growth-by-dr-cecil-bohanon-and-dr-john-horowitz\/","title":{"rendered":"Data shows rich outpace poor in income growth &#8211; by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.garfield.library.upenn.edu\/merton\/matthew1.pdf\"><span data-contrast=\"none\">Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman discussed how eminent scientists receive more credit for the same work than less well-known scientists. <\/span><\/a><span data-contrast=\"auto\">They called this the Matthew Effect, referring to Matthew 25:29 in the Bible: &#8220;For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.&#8221;\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">For income, the Matthew Effect is the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. One way to look at the rich and the poor is to look at quintiles. Quintiles are calculated by ranking households from the richest to the poorest and then dividing households into five equal groups or quintiles. The richest 20% are in the top quintile, and the poorest 20% are in the bottom quintile. <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/sgp.fas.org\/crs\/misc\/R44705.pdf\"><span data-contrast=\"none\">Since 1967, real mean household income has increased for all quintiles.<\/span><\/a><span data-contrast=\"auto\"> Annual growth rates were 0.4% for the bottom quintile, 0.6% for the second quintile, 0.7% for the third quintile, 0.9% for the fourth quintile, and 1.5% for the richest quintile. Rising inequality was primarily because the richest quintile&#8217;s incomes increased faster than households in other quintiles. The poor&#8217;s incomes increased. Using 2019 numbers to adjust for inflation, mean income in the bottom 20% increased from $10,738 in 1967 to $15,286 in 2019.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">A household&#8217;s current position in the income distribution is affected by where they were previously. For example, between 2009 and 2012, about 69% of those in the lowest income quintile remained in the lowest income quintile, and about 71% of households in the top quintile remained in the top quintile. For the other quintiles, about half remained in the same quintile. However, mobility increases over longer time periods.\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">What are the primary predictors of upward mobility? <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/inequality.stanford.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/SOTU_2015_economic-mobility.pdf\"><span data-contrast=\"none\">In a 2015 article, Raj Chetty and his co-authors found households in cities like San Jose, CA, and Salt Lake City are more mobile than households in cities like Indianapolis, IN and Charlotte, NC<\/span><\/a><span data-contrast=\"auto\">. They found that family structure was the largest determinant, and children with married parents are more upwardly mobile. Likewise, the quality of the K-12 school system and having good social networks and community involvement increase mobility upward. More recently, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/blog\/up-front\/2022\/08\/02\/7-key-takeaways-from-chettys-new-research-on-friendship-and-economic-mobility\/\"><span data-contrast=\"none\">Chetty and his colleagues found that social connections between people of different economic backgrounds are important for upward mobility.<\/span><\/a><span data-contrast=\"auto\">\u00a0<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Both the rich and the poor are getting richer, though the rich are getting richer faster. We will leave it to the reader decide what that implies.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman discussed how eminent scientists receive more credit for the same work than less well-known scientists. They called this the Matthew Effect, referring to Matthew 25:29 in the Bible: &#8220;For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[26,32,22,28,27,7,21,24,25,23,30,31,29],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-mobility","tag-annual-growth-rates","tag-community-involvement","tag-income","tag-income-distribution","tag-income-inequality","tag-inflation","tag-matthew-effect","tag-poor","tag-quintiles","tag-rich","tag-social-mobility","tag-social-network","tag-upward-mobility"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Data shows rich outpace poor in income growth - by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz - Econ Briefs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/people.bsu.edu\/econbriefs\/2025\/04\/29\/data-shows-rich-outpace-poor-in-income-growth-by-dr-cecil-bohanon-and-dr-john-horowitz\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Data shows rich outpace poor in income growth - by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz - Econ Briefs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman discussed how eminent scientists receive more credit for the same work than less well-known scientists. 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