Economic expansions are supposed to be the good times, the periods in which incomes and living standards improve. And that’s still true, at least for some of us.

But who benefits from rising incomes in an expansion has changed drastically over the last 60 years. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, an economist at Bard College, created a chart that vividly shows how. (The chart appears in print in the Fall 2014 edition of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, in her article “Reorienting fiscal policy: A bottom-up approach.”)

Back in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, most of the income gains experienced during expansions — the periods from the trough of one recession until the onset of another — accrued to most of the people. That is to say, the bottom 90 percent of earners captured at least a majority of the rise in income.

With each expansion in sequence, however, the bottom 90 percent captured a smaller share of income gains and the top 10 percent captured more.