The Horatio Alger myth or reality?

According to Thomas Sowell the Horatio Alger myth is more reality than myth.

When we talk about “the rich” and “the poor” we mean rich and poor human beings, not rich and poor statistical brackets. Yet politicians and the media treat people and statistical categories as if they were the same thing.

Check out these numbers.

The even bigger joker is that taxpayers whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1996 had a 91 percent increase in incomes by 2005.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the top one-hundredth of one percent — “the rich” or “superrich” if you believe politicians and the media — had their incomes drop by 26 percent over those very same years.

 Brackets don’t move the people in the brackets do.

You can check out the numbers for yourself in a November 13, 2007 report from the Treasury Department titled “Income Mobility in the United States from 1996 to 2005.” You can find a summary of the same data in a Wall Street Journal editorial that same day.

These are not the only data that tell a diametrically opposite story from the usual political and media story that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

A previous Treasury Department study showed similar patterns in individual income changes between 1979 and 1988.

Moreover, a study conducted at the University of Michigan, following the same individuals over an even longer span of time, likewise found most people moving from income bracket to income bracket over time — especially among those who began in the bottom 20 percent.

The University of Michigan Panel Survey on Income Dynamics showed that, among people who were in the bottom 20 percent income bracket in 1975, only 5 percent were still in that category in 1991. Nearly six times as many of them were now in the top 20 percent in 1991. (emphasis mine)

Read the article here.