Data Doesn’t Lie
Connecting the Dots on Income Inequality by Giorgia Lupi (image: Pentagram).
Have the rich got richer and the poor got poorer? The statistics says yes, and Pentagram’s data humanist Giorgia Lupi has built a sculpture that brings those numbers to life.
Connecting the Dots on Income Inequality is a large-scale installation that converts a think tank’s findings into a three-dimensional data visualisation that brings home America’s exploding wealth disparity.
Lupi is an information designer and partner at design studio Pentagram. Her work is concerned with data humanism: a discipline that takes cool, impersonal statistics and shows the human stories behind them.
For Connecting the Dots, Lupi and her team used a paper written by RAND, a nonprofit research organisation that had the depressing idea to collect data on American incomes between 1975 and 2018 and compare it to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
RAND found that, while the top 10 per cent of Americans saw their incomes grow at the same rate as the economy – with the top 1 per cent growing even faster – the remaining 90 per cent saw their income stagnate, growing slower than GDP.
Yellow coins represent income in $10,000 increments
Put down on paper the results are shocking enough, but when the paper is strung up on the wall the disparity between America’s top earners and the rest of its citizens are palpable.
To make the concept of wealth more tangible for Connecting the Dots, Lupi created a cloud of dangling yellow coins made out of paper scraps scrounged from checks, bank statements and receipts. The detritus of life under capitalism.
The top row of yellow dots represents the incomes of people in 1975, arranged left to right with the bottom 25 per cent at the far left and the top one per cent at the furthest right. Each yellow coin represents $10,000.
“The large-scale data sculpture gives physical shape to the persistent inequalities that are embedded in our economic system.”
Underneath is the same arrangement for incomes in 2018, adjusted for inflation. Lupi added orange coins to show income growth. Red, patterned discs show income growth that has exceeded statistical predictions, based on GDP growth. Orange patterned circles represent the reverse.
Along with the ballooning amount of yellow in the lower right half of the frame, the red patterned discs cluster over to the right while the orange patterns are stuck on the left. If that left-behind 90 per cent of Americans had kept pace with the country’s economy, RAND calculated, they would have taken home $2.25 trillion in 2018 alone. Ouch.
“The large-scale data sculpture gives physical shape to the persistent inequalities that are embedded in our economic system,” explains Pentagram.
Connecting the Dots is made from old receipts and bank statements
Even RAND’s report struggled to grapple with the vast gulf opening up between the haves and the have-nots. The researchers calculated that the difference between the bottom 90 and the top 10 over the 43 years they examined is $47tn.
“That's so large, it becomes difficult to interpret,” said economist Kathryn A. Edwards, a researcher for RAND. “But that's what happens when incomes at the bottom grow at a rate that's about 20 percent of GDP, and top incomes grow at 300 percent of GDP over four decades.” America’s income inequality is now so bad that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has ranked it the worst of all the G7 countries.
Pentagram’s data sculpture can’t tell the story of why America’s income inequality is so egregious – and it’s a thorny political issue. The right wants to argue that cheap labour in China is stealing away factory jobs, conveniently ignoring the left’s argument that the country’s inglorious history of union-busting has left home-grown workers in a precarious position.
Red dots show where the top 10 percent exceeded predicted income growth
A booming culture of management consultancy has gutted the middle class for over half a century. Walmart, an $800bn company that employs 1.5 million workers in the US, is infamous for paying poverty wages. It had to be dragged kicking and screaming to introduce a $1 hourly raise last week in response to covid labour shortages.
Last year the Oscar-winning film Nomadland took its audience inside the lives of elderly Americans reduced to living in tricked-out old vans and working in Amazon factories after losing it all in the 2008 recession. In contrast, the compensation for US CEOs has grown 940 per cent since 1978. In 2020, the average CEO in America made $15.3m, according to the Institute for Political Studies – an annual raise of 29 per cent.
Lupi’s egg-yolk yellow visualisation is a particularly happy colour to tell such an upsetting story, but at least it whets the appetite for eating the rich.
Story source: Pentagram