>Does anybody have a link to a historical time-series
>for the Gini index for the US? Going back the farther
>the better. There are a number of promising links
>that Google serves up, but none of them goes
>anywhere useful.
You mean the Luxembourg Income Studies where they used the Gini Index to look at class mobility in various countries?
If so: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/
if you search on Luxembourg Income Study Gini or something like that, you get old papers online under their old URL, www.lisproject.org - usually pdf format. You can also find stuff under "Luxembourg Income Study" + "gini coefficient" OR + "class mobility".
Also, the book version of the study to which a number of people refer is two decades old now, though I think it'd be big news if anything changed, but the title is, "The constant flux: a study of class mobility in industrial societies."
It's such a shame about the Web. 12 years ago, that entire study was online, readily available, bada boom bada bing. Now, you have to search through all kinds of crap....