3 In 1968 in the U.S. the ratio of the average earnings of the top 10% of the population to those of the bottom 10% was 6.7 (i.e., the income of the top 10% was 6.7 times greater than that of the bottom 10%); in the USSR, it was 3.7, down from 4.4 in 1956, and would fall to 3.2 in 1970. See Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, The USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 438.