Introduction

There has recently been considerable popular and professional interest about what may have happened to the UK income distribution during the 1980s. Explaining what happened is predicated on establishing what the changes actually were and how different groups were affected, and yet there is a variety of ways in which the facts about the changing shape of the distribution could be persuasively summarised. Broad-brush overviews are tempting but they are likely to miss a lot of economically important features which fill out the picture of what really happened in the United Kingdom during the 1980s. There are several ways of making the picture richer. One could just provide many more numbers – lots of data for income classes and population groups, an array of statistics on dispersion – but in this chapter we argue the merits of an alternative, complementary, approach. We analyse in greater detail than hitherto the changes in the shape of the income distribution using graphical methods, and show how this analysis can be informative about the causes of the secular changes in income distribution in recent times.

The motivation for our alternative approach is to let the facts speak for themselves as far as possible.