From Rachel Maddow Blog

The wealth inequality chart Rachel showed last night

By Will Femia

 - 

Thu Jun 21, 2012 8:31 PM EDT

In last night's introduction to Rachel's interview with Chris Hayes about his new book, she showed a graph depicting the wealth distribution people prefer, the distribution they think exists and the actual distribution of wealth in America. Folks on the Twitter clamored for the link, and our intern Sally tells me there are a lot of requests for it in the Rachel@msnbc.com mailbox as well, so here it is.

It comes as part of a nice collection of related infographics on the Mother Jones site.

If you're a source material kind of person, the actual study is here (pdf) and includes another, longer chart, which one of the researchers, Dan Ariely, explains on his blog.

Also, you may be aware, Timothy Noah at Slate wrote a huge series about income inequality. Here's his write-up of the study that produced this chart.