I can hardly believe myself that my culture could have produced such idiocy.    The statistic for a rise in income per capita is obviously not the statistic for average income gain.   And the statistic for income of poor people obviously does not tell us whether they had economic gains or losses without information on prices for the poor.   All studies of ""inequality"" from economists suffer from the mortality flaw (inequality looks worse if poor people stay alive) and the inflation flaw.    But these studies are always used as evidence for poor people doing better or worse.