Page 216 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

The enormous lead of the well-to-do in the economic race has been
considerably reduced.
COBACOBA

It is the industrial workers who as a group have done best—people such as a
steelworker’s family who used to live on $2,500 and now are getting $4,500,
or the highly skilled machine-tool operator’s family who used to have

$3,000 and now can spend an annual $5,500 or more.

As for the top one percent, the really well-to-do and the rich, whom we
might classify very roughly indeed as the $16,000-and-over group, their
share of the total national income, after taxes, had come down by 1945 from
13 percent to 7 percent.

This was not a short-term trend. Real income for the bottom 20% of wage-
earners grew by a nearly identical amount as the top 5% from 1950 to 1980.

The equality went beyond wages.

Women held jobs outside the home in record numbers. Their labor force
participation rate went from 31% after the war to 37% by 1955, and to 40%
by 1965.

Minorities gained, too. After the 1945 inauguration Eleanor Roosevelt wrote
about an African American reporter who told her:

Do you realize what twelve years have done? If at the 1933 reception a
number of colored people had gone down the line and mixed with everyone
else in the way they did today, every paper in the country would have
reported it. We do not even think it is news and none of us will mention it.

Women and minority rights were still a fraction of what they are today. But
the progress toward equality in the late ’40s and ’50s was extraordinary.