id: 06214144
dt: j
an: 2013f.00741
au: Moses, Leo R.; Truog, Trevor R.; Sommers, Paul M.
ti: Is the gap between “haves” and “have-nots” really widening?
so: J. Recreat. Math. 37(2008), No. 2, 95-101 (2012).
py: 2012
pu: Baywood Publishing Company, Amityville, NY
la: EN
cc: M30 M40 M70 K40
ut: mathematical applications; economics; income distributions; income gap;
    USA; statistical data; social sciences; mathematics and politics;
    mathematics and society; equality; money; financial mathematics; Gini
    index of inequality; Gini coefficients; concentration measures; Lorenz
    curve; exploratory data analysis; quintile ratio
ci: 
li: 
ab: From the introduction: The “Occupy Wall Street" protests and marches that
    began in the fall of 2011 against social and economic inequality in the
    United States have sparked similar demonstrations across the nation.
    The disparity between the richest 1\% and everyone else has become part
    of the national discourse. Since the end of World War II the United
    States has collected detailed data on a variety of conceivable
    statistical measures of income inequality to empirically test the claim
    that the rich are getting richer (and the poor are getting poorer). The
    most familiar of these measures is the Gini coefficient of
    concentration. Evidently, the Gini coefficient, as a way of measuring
    the gap between rich and poor, is somewhat flawed. In this brief
    research note we propose to examine two alternative metrics of income
    inequality: (i) the ratio of the upper income limit of the fourth
    quintile of all families (all races) to the upper income limit of the
    lowest quintile and (ii) the ratio of the lower income limit of the top
    5\% of all families to the upper income limit of the lowest quintile.
    We are curious to see if, over the 64-year period from 1947 to 2010,
    the gap between the “haves" and the “have-nots" has increased, that
    is, whether the two aforementioned ratios have increased.
rv: