The top 1% of US households own as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined
Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale
A scrolling visualization stacks US household wealth in $100 bills, one pixel per $5,000, to show how far the climb really goes. The median household holds $211,292; the average top-1% household holds $40.4 million, roughly 191 times more. The top 1% owns 32% of all US wealth, about equal to the entire bottom 90%, while the bottom half owns just 2.5%.
The top 1% of households owns almost a third (32%) of all U.S. wealth: roughly as much as the entire bottom 90% put together.
- j1elo
(Just an objective comment, I'm not positioning here) this honestly puts the "tax the rich more" in perspective. A tiny tax increment to the rightmost column would provide more money than 100 years of all the other pitiful contributions together.
- bushbaba
Kind of makes a point to have a wealth tax. As the top 1% of w2 earners are paying a disproportionate amount of tax relative to too 1% of wealth holders.
That or just raise interest rates to force these people to sell more equity
- solatic
Part of the problem I have with graphs like this is that they don't differentiate between paper wealth, being able to get a loan against the paper wealth, and hard assets (real estate, vehicles, cash).
Let's take a personal anecdote for an example: I joined a startup when it was early-stage, stayed for a few years, and exercised my stock options when I left. The startup is now "successful", but still private; my shares have also surely been heavily diluted. I have no idea when I'll be able to sell those shares or how much they're really worth. I have no way of turning those shares into quality-of-life improvements for any foreseeable future. Do they make me "wealthy"?
I don't think most Americans have a problem with rich people buying nice houses and nice cars, and using their wealth to pay for private staff. I think the real problem is how much of the wealth is allowed to stay off public markets. Cargill is worth more than $50 billion and its stock is not available on public markets. The growth in wealth of most AI companies - Anthropic, OpenAI - happened off of public markets, and so none of it trickled into the American middle class by their retirement accounts. Venture capital is keeping companies private for longer because, quite simply, none of the investors need the cash to pay for their cost of living, so they're quite happy to let paper gains continue to live on paper.
If your company has revenues of $X million a year or more, you should be forced to make public fina […]
- sorobahn
As a w2 earner, taxes make me feel shame and rage. Shame knowing how ineffectively my taxes will translate into helping my fellow Americans/my communities/my grandchildren. The rage is for the realization that the most valuable people in our society (our doctors, engineers, small-med business owners) are the ones mainly footing the bill for select greedy and power hungry politicians. I’ll admit I haven’t validated if this is empirically true based on the numbers. It’s just feelings that come up looking at my daughter and knowing some of my taxes probably blew up an entire school of little girls who aren’t much different than her.
- alex_suzuki
Why has this suddenly disappeared from the front page? It’s not flagged.
Must have interfered with SV reality distortion field.
- consumer451
It never occurred to me to render a web page that is partially scrolled down, on load. After decades of browsing the web, this is truly novel to me. Has anyone seen a page do that before?
Not usually a fan of messing with scroll, but what a cool visualization use case for breaking that norm. Taxes and politics aside, kudos to whoever made that design choice.
- makerofthings
Why don't the humans from the left 99% simple eat the humans from the right 1%?
- delis-thumbs-7e
Federal reserve does not count salary into Net Worth as far as I can see: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/files/Networth%20Flow...
Since most people’s income comes from salary, it is very easy to read this graph wrong and it is a bit misleading. Say you are some dev who makes $500k per year, but likes to rent, doesn’t drive and is not very bothered with stocks. Their Net Worth - unless I understand this wrong, if I do please correct me - the would around zero, maybe less with student loans, so they would be amongst the poor. Ok, they probably would have a lot of savings in this scenario, but maybe they like to ride on a horse with no name and spend most of their income. Still I would not call them poor.
Does it change the picture? Not really, because Musk et al. are so way beyond everyone else that the graph is extremely top heavy. It is a nice data visualisation regardless.
- sandos
So.. when I google "median income eu vs US" I get some completely different figures: $51k / $64k-65k median for the US, and €21k in the EU.
So the median household in the US has 3 working adults? Is $211k household according to that page.
- gus_massa
It shows an "ideal" distribution. How did they calculate it?