Income and inequality historical data explorer
The Institute for Fiscal Studies collates and shares historical data on UK income and income inequality. It's brilliant data so I've made a data visualisation to match.
Starting with Harold Wilson in 1964 I show how UK inequality has changed under every UK Prime Minister. By plotting this against the inflation-adjusted disposable income of households at each income percentile I show how families from poorest to richest have fared under each Prime Minister.
Source: IFS. Graph by: @thomasforth
What are percentiles?
Line every household in the UK up from poorest to richest and the median household is the one in the middle. We can also call this the family at the 50th percentile of household income.
But what if we want to look at poorer households? Or richer households? It's useful then to look at different percentiles, not just the 50th.
Since there are about 27 million households in the UK there are about 2.7 million households with a disposable income below the 10th percentile. Similarly there are 2.7 million households above the 90th percentile. Pick your percentile and see how households around it have fared.
Who made this?
This page was made by Thomas Forth at imactivate using data from The Institute for Fiscal Studies.
I run the challenge team at the Open Innovations in Leeds where we work with clients from all over the world to get more value out of data. Please get in touch if we can help you with your data project.