I would have to disagree with the basic gist of the article. For one, there is no such thing really as the "income pie." No more then there is such a thing as a "Weight Pie" or a "Height Pie" in society, even though you could record the height and weight of all 300+ million Americans, and then look at the "distribution," if you will, of height and weight in society. Obesity is a problem among the poor right now. But it obviously wouldn't make sense to claim that the poor are being unfairly forced to carry around an excessive amount of "society's weight."
Income is very similar. There is no societal "pie" of income. Income is just what one earns in exchange for what they produce. Nor are statistical brackets such as the top 10% and bottom 90% representative of fixed classes of people. Many people who thirty years ago were in the bottom income brackets are not in higher income brackets. People move between them.
One thing I would ask is, if the period starting in the 1980s was so terrible for the general population, then why are those remembered as being such economic golden times? Reagan was re-elected in a landslide. And everyone remembers the golden economic times of the Clinton years. But according to many who look at the data, the general population was getting pounded and crushed during the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. Had that really been the case, Reagan would likely not have been re-elected, nor would Clinton.
The large income gains seen by those who make up the richest in society are a result of the massive amount of wealth creation that we saw starting in the 1980s, primarily due to technology. You had lots of very huge fortunes that were created, which thus created an overall increased concentration of wealth at the top.
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