Income disparity

Two pieces are filed under income disparity, and neither one is a table of quintiles. One follows airline pilots and hedge fund managers as a pair of careers whose pay moved apart; the other reads a television series about a teacher turned manufacturer as evidence of what medical bills do to a household. The column preferred a case it could describe to an aggregate it would have had to take on trust.

Incomes, thresholds and the index formulas applied to households are the subject of the portal’s Society section, which works from published statistical definitions — what a figure counts, what it leaves out, and when it is revised. Both archive entries below stay at the addresses the column gave them, under their own dates and byline, with the author’s rubrication preserved.

A described case and a national aggregate answer different questions, and the column’s preference for the first is worth knowing before reading either piece: they are evidence about particular trades and particular households, not estimates for a country. The portal’s work on thresholds and index formulas supplies the other half of that, from published definitions. Both entries are listed below in the order the column published them, each under its own date and reachable from every heading its author used.