Noam Chomsky: Modern universities designed to ‘deprive you of your freedom’

[Romulox]

34. LOL. "Normal distribution" my eye.

The Gini coefficient amounts to a kind of percentage and can run from 0 to 100. A Gini of 0 represents 0 percent concentration in a country’s income distribution. In a country with a Gini coefficient of 0, everyone receives exactly the same income.
A Gini coefficient of 100 represents 100 percent concentration in a country’s income distribution. In a country with a Gini of 100, one person receives all of the country’s income. Everyone else gets nothing.


In between 0 and 100, Gini coefficients are harder to interpret. A Gini coefficient of 50 represents 50 percent concentration in a country’s income distribution. What does it mean to have 50 percent concentration in a country’s income?

A Gini of 50 could mean that half the people share all of the income while the other half get nothing. In other words, a country that literally consisted of haves and have-nots in a 50-50 split would have a Gini coefficient of 50.

This scenario, of course, isn’t very realistic. Everyone, no matter how poor, has to have some income to live. There are no literal have-nots.

We could also have a Gini coefficient of 50 with the top 10 percent of a country’s population very well-off, the next 50 percent more or less equal, and the bottom 40 percent very poor.

With some fiddling around the edges, that’s more or less the situation in America today.

According to the Census Bureau, the official Gini coefficient for the United States was 46.9 in 2010, the most recent year with data available. This is way up from the all-time low of 38.6 set in 1968.
- See more at: http://inequality.org/unequal-americas-income-distribution/#sthash.uql38duV.dpuf