Manhattan's Towering Income Inequality, in 2 Charts

When it comes to income inequality, New York County—aka Manhattan—tops the list, according to sociologist Andrew Beveridge of Queens College and the Graduate Center at CUNY. At a recent conference on inequality, Beveridge shared research showing that Manhattan is "the most unequal" of all U.S. counties with a population above 100,000 people.

The size of the Manhattan wealth gap as graphed by Beveridge is pretty astonishing. In one chart below, he compares the mean incomes of the "haves" and "have-nots" in Manhattan against its neighboring counties, the rest of New York City, and the country as a whole. According to his calculations, the top 20 percent's mean income is 43 times that of the bottom 20 percent of earners in Manhattan. For the city as a whole, this ratio is 26 to 1.