My point is just to reiterate the importance of income mobility and to emphasize that those studies are not considering it in their analysis. The problem with those studies is that when they're doing their comparisons of the income distribution, they're doing it at particular points in time. So if there is a gap between the top 20% and the bottom 20% in one year, say 1990, and they do the comparison 10 years later and find that it stayed the same or grew slightly, we can't draw policy conclusions from that alone because the people in the bottom 20% and the top 20% are not the same people year after year. This is why the findings in our study are so important.
What makes Canadian society so great is that people aren't stuck in those income groups. What's really great about our society is that you can transition from the lowest to the highest, and in very short time. The studies that were cited earlier do not account for income mobility, and therefore they provide misleading conclusions.
Let me just say one more thing about our study. We looked at income inequality the way people look at it in those other studies, but we follow the same group of people. So in 1990 we found that people in the top 20% earned about 13 times the income of people in the bottom 20%. That was in 1990. For the same group of people 19 years later, some in the bottom 20% had moved up to the very top, some moved up to the third income group, and some people in the top 20% initially had moved down. What we found is that now, in 2009, the average income of those in the top 20% was only two times the level of those in the bottom 20% initially in 1990—