Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street crowd is camped out in the wrong place. Maybe the offshoots of the Occupy movement, springing up in dozens of cities across the nation, should be protesting outside of hospitals and office buildings. A report written by a trio of economists from the Treasury Department, Williams College and Indiana University finds that the richest 1 percent are not concentrated on Wall Street or even in the finance industry.Many of them are medical care professionals – elite doctors and health care administrators – and business executives who toil in sectors of the economy that have no connection to big banks or the Dow or the NASDAQ. Catherine Rampell, an economics reporter for The New York Times, calls them the people who work in the C-suites across America. If the primary complaint of the 99ers protesting on Wall Street is income inequality, Rampell concludes in a blog post, then they should fan out across the country.
The richest 1 percent aren’t who we think they are
The study cited by Rampell finds that about a third of Americans in the top 1 percent were executives, managers and supervisors who work outside of finance. The next biggest share, at 15.7 percent, went to medical professionals, followed by those in financial services with 13.9 percent.
These figures exclude capital gains income and they are only available, most currently, for 2005. That was before the crash of 2008, when Wall Street was flying high. The Occupiers would certainly argue that the big banks have done a lot of damage and squandered billions in TARP money since then, which makes them the target.
But the figures show that the stereotype of the 1 percent is pretty far off the mark.
Rampell offers some highly detailed charts, going back to 1979, which can be viewed here.
