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What about a Tony Gwynn who batted .338 in his career? Doesn't he prove that some baseball players are better at hitting the ball? Well, you can't prove it by looking at the statistics. With enough players in the league and enough seasons - guys like Tony Gwynn will always appear even if everyone were of the same skill.
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Colin, when working statistics, there are a few important things to remember:
Within a a bell curve result group, there are always exceptional results that lie to the extreme ends (both ends) of the result curve. These results often greatly affect the group mean. These results are so exceptional as to fall outside of the "curve". In order to avoid skewing results, normally up to 10% of results (5% top and 5% bottom) are ignored or discarded to avoid misleading results.
In a discussion of "rich and poor", once you remove certain EXCEPTIONAL wealth cases, and remove EXCEPTIONAL povery, the remaining bell curve of earnings withing a given society hasn't greatly changed in the last 50 years. The mean income has moved, of course, but the shape and distribution of results remains fairly constant.
The difference in the last 50 years has to do with the extremes of wealth and poverty, and how the 5% top and bottom are now more extreme. As executive pay, stock options, and such have come into play in the last 15 years, the gap between workers and high management has increased at an alarming rate. In the 5% normally thrown out for being outside the curve, you see a greater concentration of wealth than ever before.
When you leave ALL results in the pool, there appears to be a huge skew to "rich getting richer", which is true - but the small percentage of super billionaires is draggin up the average at the top. Poor can't get any poorer, but rich can always get richer!
While the numbers can't lie, they sure can tell some interesting tales!
Alex