Anatomy of the US Income Distribution: Two Decades of Change.

Forty years ago, Simon Kuznets, in his presidential address to the American Economics Association, outlined his hypothesis that the process of economic development would first be accompanied by rising disparities in economic well-being, followed by a period when the distribution wouls be stable or eventually move toward greater equality. The distributional changes over the last two decades have been accompanied by a number of key demographic and economic developments.