ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by the income shift,

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the time of day when you actually focus on making money.

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All right. Check out this image. A lot of green.

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What led to the income shift shown in the image?

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And here are the potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right, well, let's start by getting a grip on the graph.

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This is a distribution chart

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of annual household incomes,

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so each bar represents what percentage of the population

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makes that level of income.

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And we can see that it's heavily weighted to the left,

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meaning that most Americans make much less than

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the small group way down on the right end of the chart.

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That trend is not so trendy.

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Did this income shift to the left occur because of A -

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a decrease in the number of publicly traded companies?

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Huh. A decrease in the number of publicly traded companies? Huh?

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With all those IPOs going around?

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Uh, no, that would reflect a decline in income across

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all brackets, probably, so that nixes A.

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Could this shift have happened because of B -

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increasing numbers of Americans graduating from college?

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Well, actually, an increase in the number of college grads,

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as well as growth in the information technology sector,

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has caused some incomes to rise,

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but only enough to sustain the median.

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So that eliminates B and D.

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Which means that the income shift to the left was the result of C -

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a decline in manufacturing jobs and unions.

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This decline eroded middle class wealth and caused

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incomes to drop, so C is the right answer.

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And because of this shift, the majority of the nation's

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wealth is now concentrated in the so-called one percent,

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who must be very happy.

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[ sobbing ]

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[ whirr ]

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