Every night he rowed out in his canoe and set his fishpots and threw down his lines, and every morning he rowed into Giddy Beach with a canoeful of dead fish and sold the dead fish to women as poor as himself, who would higgle him furiously, insult his fish, call him a jinal, meaning that he was intent on robbing them, paw over the corpses of the fish, hold him up to cynical comparison with more successful fishermen, accuse him of having a white mother, call him a Rastafarian, then walk away clutching contemptuously at the dead fish wrapped in newspaper, for which they had paid Baba’s price.
Gauging by one fairly comprehensive measure of income used by the Congressional Budget Office, the share of income garnered by those in the top 1 percent of the distribution more than doubled between 1979 and 2007 to about 17 percent, while the share accruing to those in the 1st through 80th percentiles fell 9 percentage points.