The Distribution Of U.S. Household Income Is Far Beyond ‘Normal’

Income inequality has been growing in the U.S. for decades. One way to look at it, to see how non-normal the distribution of income has become, is to consider a basic concept in statistics. Given the mean (average value) and the median (middle point) in all your data, a ‘normal’ distribution associated with a bell curve would see mean equal median. The greater the difference between these, the more things are slanted one way or the other.

Using Census Bureau median and mean income data, you can see how close those two points once were and how different they’ve become. For example, here is the difference between median and mean household incomes over time across all races: