RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1% - The median worker should be making as much as $102,000 annually—if some $2.5 trillion wasn’t being “reverse distributed” every year

Thanks for sharing this. These are all things that I “knew”, but this kind of visualization really is astonishingly compelling, and “amount of time spent scrolling” puts the magnitude into perspective in a really impactful way.

They appear to be different.

What they are doing appears to simply be a comparison of changes in the distribution of yearly incomes for "full-time, full-year workers". I would assume, from that description, that it does not include people who do not work full-time and live off of unearned income, but the text does not that, for people it includes, it does include unearned income. The "reverse distribution" they are referring to is not a static distribution, but a change over time in the shape of the distribution of incomes, taking somewhat as an assumption that the distribution in 1975 was not bad, but generally looking at the change, and showing an increasingly unequal distribution that changes in a very top-weighted way, such that even 95th percentile incomes are diminished. These changes could be related to a change in surplus value over time, but I think there are situations where changes to the distributions of worker incomes could result in no change of surplus value (by rearranging unequal worker incomes), and, if the distribution does not include non-worker incomes, there are situations where a change in surplus value would not change the shape of the distribution of worker incomes (eg, all workers make less, proportionally, and non-working owners make more).

This distribution-only approach has an advantage of not being as reliant on choices of theoretical models—something that seems particularly important in trying to make an argument to a diverse audience—but may arguably be less broadly insightful than something more model-based might be.