We are the 99% is a political slogan widely used and coined during the 2011 Occupy movement. The phrase directly refers to the income and wealth inequality in the United States, with a concentration of wealth among the top-earning 1%. It reflects an opinion that "the 99%" are paying the price for the mistakes of a tiny minority within the upper class.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2019, the average wage of the top 1% was $758,434. However, the 1% is not necessarily a reference to top 1% of wage earners, but a reference to the top 1% of individuals by net worth, whose earned wages are only a fraction of their total sources of wealth.
Origin
Mainstream accounts
The slogan "We are the 99%" became a unifying slogan of the Occupy movement in August 2011 after a Tumblr blog, "wearethe99percent.tumblr.com," was launched in late August 2011 by a 28-year-old New York activist going by the name of "Chris" together with Priscilla Grim.
Chris credited an August 2011 flyer for the NYC assembly "We The 99%" for the term. A 2011 Rolling Stone article attributed to anthropologist David Graeber the suggestion that the Occupy movement represented the 99%. Graeber was sometimes credited with the slogan "We are the 99%" but attributed the full version to others.
Mainstream media sources trace the origin of the phrase to economist Joseph Stiglitz's May 2011 article "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" in Vanity Fair, in which he was criticizing the economic inequality present in the United States. In the article Stiglitz spoke of the damaging impact of economic inequality involving 1% of the U.S. population owning a large portion of economic wealth in the country, while 99% of the population hold much less economic wealth than the richest 1%:
Earlier uses of the term "the one percent" to refer to the wealthiest people in society include the 2006 documentary The One Percent (film) about the growing wealth gap between the wealthy elite compared to the overall population, and a 2001 opinion column in the MIT student newspaper The Tech (newspaper).
Other published accounts
More than one publication dates the concept back much further. For instance, Gore Vidal spoke of "the one percent who own the country, whose power is increasing, not decreasing" in a 1987 interview with Playboy. The one percent and the 99 percent were explained in a February 1984 article titled "The USA: Who Owns It? Who Runs It?" in Black Liberation Month News, published in Chicago and available online as of 2020.
Even further back, historian Howard Zinn used this concept in "The Coming Revolt of the Guards", the final chapter in the first edition of his book A People's History of the United States published in 1980. "I am taking the liberty of uniting those 99 percent as 'the people'. I have been writing a history that attempts to represent their submerged, deflected, common interest. To emphasize the commonality of the 99 percent, to declare deep enmity of interest with the 1 percent, is to do exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them—from the Founding Fathers to now—have tried their best to prevent."
The 1960 novel Too Many Clients by Rex Stout, part of the Nero Wolfe mystery series, refers to the top two percent: "I know a chairman of the board of a billion-dollar corporation, one of the 2 per cent, [sic] who never gets his shoes shined and shaves three times a week."
The first mention of the concept may very well be found in a poster (circa 1935) advertising the newspaper created by the populist Louisiana politician Huey Long called The American Progress. The second paragraph mentioned the one percent and the ninety-nine percent: "With 1% of our people owning nearly twice as much as all the other 99%, how is a country ever to have permanent progress unless there is a correction of this evil?"