This chart comes from the Financial Times by way of Roger Pielke.   The horizontal axis runs from poor to rich.   The vertical axis show how much their income changed in the last 20 years.   For example the poorest 10-15% saw their incomes rise by 50% over the last 20 years.  That’s about 2% a year.

So how much did the world economy grow (per person or household) during this 20 years.  I’m not clever enough to answer that question quickly.  This other chart shows world GDP (it has a very cool horizontal axis).  And that suggests that growth was 4% during the first decade and effectively zero during the second.  But I’d take that with a grain of salt.

Of course, given how skewed the income distribution is, it takes a lot more money to raise the top 10 percent by 2% v.s. the bottom 50%.  This chart totally obscures that.  So while it’s good that the 5%..70% saw their incomes rise I’m not confident that they got a reasonable share of the over all growth.

None the less, a thought-provoking chart.