What Drives Top Incomes?

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In the 19 sixties, UK had highest top mate income tax rate in world at 90%. Now it's 20% and there is no incentive to earn more than that. Top earners are better able now to extract very high salaries from corpord bolls. That's at the expense of maybe other workers in the firms. And i think explains not everything, but part of the increase in the very highest incomes in the west.

Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his research on inequality and the distribution of income in the United States over the last 35 years. Zucman finds that there has been no change in income for the bottom half of the income distribution over this time period with large gains going to the top 1%. The conversation explores the robustness of this result to various assumptions and possible explanations for the findings.