Time, the Forgotten Variable

Here's an interesting set of statistics. We oftentimes hear of the top 1% and the bottom this and that percent. Well, this graph shows quite clearly that while politicians are always talking about them as monolithic groups, the fact of the matter is that people are moving up and down all the time. In fact, as we can see here, the bottom tend to move up at a faster rate than most, while those at the top are actually more likely to move down. More, we see that on average everyone's lot in life in the U.S. improved quite a bit in this ten year span. When we talk about poverty and wealth, we have to keep in mind that things change quite a bit -- indeed, time is the one thing we like to forget about when dealing with complex social issues.