Income Inequality in America

I was reading one of my favorites, Prof. Hsu's blog. The latest post talks about recent research done on income inequality in the US. Trying to understand what was being said lead me to Gini coefficients.

The first thing that struck me as interesting was the color of Bolivia vs that of the US in the world map of Gini indices. That turns out to not be interesting, though, as one finds out by reading the disadvantages section of the article: since Bolivia is a lot smaller of an economy comparison of Gini coefficients between the US and Bolivia yields little or no information about the relative amount of inequality in both countries.

However, one can still make some comparisons in America. The picture is plenty bad. Notice that Canada is green, US is orange and Latin America is red. Maybe including the US in that comparison is not in order as it has an economy (judging by the GDP) ~10 times larger than that of Canada or Latin America. Nonetheless, the redness of Latin America is certainly an unacceptable and sad state of affairs. Specially since it is a place where a lot of people get by on $1/day or less.