> In an increasingly winner-take-all or at least winner-take-most economy, the best-educated and most-skilled employees cluster inside the most successful companies, their incomes rising dramatically compared with those of outsiders.
US median income is $52K, software developer is maybe 100K, so around double. But to make that you have to live in an area with a much higher cost of living, and the various governments take more than a quarter of the difference in taxes and more than a quarter of the difference in disqualifications from income-based benefits programs. While you work 80 hours a week.
Someone making $100K in San Francisco is not doing better than someone making $50K in Houston. (You have a serious problem, however, if you make $50K in San Francisco.)
And the people clearing a million aren't typically silicon valley developers, they're Wall St quants and investment bankers. And those same people are generally paying the lower capital gains rate rather than the higher earned income rate, and losing a smaller percentage in benefits phase outs because by then everything is already phased out.
The numbers in the article are also including people who aren't working -- it has the 25th percentile income as zero and the median as something like $25K, which it probably is if you include retirees and homemakers and students, but how is that "income inequality"? For it to mean anything you have to be comparing people who are actually working full time. Anyone working obviously makes infinity times more than anyone with zero income.
As to the central thesis of "winner take most", markets like Facebook with network effects are the exception and have existed before (e.g. AT&T). In most other markets you can really blame regulatory compliance costs and regulatory capture. More paperwork to do and lawyers to hire and fees to pay to do business today than in 1970. The higher the cost of operating a business, the more advantage to consolidation.
