past twenty years. During 2013, employee compensation was $8.969trillion, while gross private investment totals $2.781trillion. Americans have the highest average household income among OECD nations, and in 2010 had the fourth-highest median household income, down from second-highest in 2007. According to one analysis middle-class incomes in the United States fell into a tie with those in Canada in 2010, and may have fallen behind by 2014, while several other advanced economies have closed the gap in recent years. Income inequality Income inequality has become a hotly debated topic globally. According to the CIA World Factbook, U.S. income inequality ranked 41st highest among 156 countries in 2017 (i.e., 74% of countries have a more equal income distribution). According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1% of income households earned about a 9% share of the pre-tax income in 1979, versus 19% in 2007 and 17% in 2014. For after-tax income, these figures were 7%, 17%, and 13%, respectively. These figures indicate the share of income earned by top earners more than doubled between 1979 and 2007, then fell somewhat following the Great Recession, and the higher tax rates and re-distributive policies applied by President Barack Obama in 2013 (i.e., expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts for the top 1% and subsidies for lower income persons via the Affordable Care Act). Recasting the 2012 income using the 1979 income distribution (representing the more egalitarian 1950–1980 period), the bottom 99% of families would have averaged about $7,100 more income. Income inequality in the United States has grown from 2005 to 2012 in more than two out of three metropolitan areas. The top 1 percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers, while their share of total income has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to twenty percent in 2011. According to a 2014 OECD report, 80% of total pre-tax market income growth went to the top 10% from 1975 to 2007. A number of economists and others have expressed growing concern about income inequality, calling it "deeply worrying", unjust, a danger to democracy/social stability, or a sign of national decline. Yale professor Robert Shiller has said, "The most important problem that we are facing now today, I think, is rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere in the world." Thomas Piketty of