Occupy Wall Street (and Beyond): Why the Protests? Here are the Charts.... (Business Insider)

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Last week Business Insider, trying to explain the motives for the Occupy protests,  published a chart-essay illustrating the extreme inequality that has developed in the US economy since the 1980s.

And for those new to the topic, here is a handy seven-slide introduction:

1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression, with the exception of a brief blip in the early 1980s):

2. At the same time, corporate profits are at an all-time high, both in absolute dollars and as a share of the economy.

 

3. Wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. In other words, corporate profits are at an all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of their revenue to employees than they ever have. There are lots of reasons for this, many of which are not the fault of the corporations. (It's a global economy now, and 2-3 billion new low-cost employees in China, India, et al, have recently entered the global workforce. This is putting pressure on wages the world over.)

4. Income and wealth inequality in the US economy is near an all-time high: The owners of the country's assets (capital) are winning, everyone else (labor) is losing.

Three charts illustrate this:

The top earners are capturing a higher share of the national income than they have anytime since the 1920s:

CEO pay and corporate profits have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, "production worker" pay has risen 4%.

After adjusting for inflation, average earnings haven't increased in 50 years.