It looks like some abstract museum installation. Yellow dots dangle in the air between a plywood frame, as if we’re getting a glimpse into Yayoi Kusama’s closet. But what you’re really seeing is a depiction of hard data: nearly half a century of income inequality that has served the top 1% of Americans, and pretty much nobody else.
Created by the design firm Pentagram for Rand Corp., the visualization is based upon the think tank’s 2020 research, which analyzed the last 43 years of U.S. economic growth. We’ve all heard the stories, and seen charts, depicting how low- and middle-class Americans have earned stagnant wages for decades when adjusted for inflation. But this newer research introduces the concept of a counterfactual. It didn’t just analyze how our economy changed; it demonstrates how wealth distribution should have been different, if 1975’s class equity had remained intact. If we maintained ’70s era wealth distribution, a person making $33,000 today would be making $61,000 instead. That’s almost double.
“The more we read the data, the more we saw charts in the reports, the more we felt [these findings] really might be overlooked,” says Giorgia Lupi, the Pentagram partner who led the project alongside designer Ting Fang. “The idea was to make the topic and actual data in the chart very tangible and understandable.”The sculpture is not on display anywhere at the moment; Pentagram built it to be photographed and annotated online. “Right as we started to talk to Rand and prototype it, Rand asked, ‘where is the actual sculpture? It would be interesting to have it in our office.’ So it might start living eventually as a physical installation,” says Lupi. “With a topic like this one, [creating something] tangible, even if it only means to photograph it for social media, might get people’s attention more. In our work, the first thing [we ask] is, will people stop? They won’t usually stop for a chart, but they may stop more if they say . . . ‘This is data, it’s beautiful. Let me swipe more to see what it’s about.'”
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