Wonder how this correlates with the current growth of the US economy, and maybe more relevantly, how the top 1% seems to be increasing its wealth much faster than the rest.
Forgive my ignorance, but why wouldnt we expect to see exponential growth in wealth, and as a result a greater discepency between the top 1% and everyone else?
Is this really that surprising? To me, it just seems to be mirroring wealth inequality. 63% of total private wealth in America is owned by the 1%[1]. I'm sure the top 1,000 have a significant amount of that 63%.
The claim that the top 1% have realized 95% of the increase in wealth over the past decade is spurious. I think the original study[1] that claim came from only argued that was the case for percentages of income growth, which is not wealth, and only true from 2009 - 2012.
I think it has been propagated since then as a different claim that the top 1% had 95% of the increase in all the wealth for the past decade. I don't think there is any evidence for this stronger claim.
Wealth inequality in the US is already at absurd levels. The top 1% of Americans have a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion (or 30.4% of all household wealth in the U.S.), while the bottom 50% of the population holds just $2.1 trillion combined (or 1.9% of all wealth).
The Fed estimates that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hold more than 88% of all available equity in corporations and mutual fund shares (with just the top 1% controlling more than twice as much equity as the bottom 50% of all Americans combined).
My point was about the top 1% creating more wealth or not. I think society as a whole is creating more wealth with many people contributing. But somehow we ended up with a situation where there top 1% percent are taking an increasing share of that wealth.
I doubt that the top 1 percent are creating more wealth than the top 1 percent did forty years ago. But somehow a bigger share of wealth is going to them now in a system that has been shaped by them. So I think they are “taking” more than they used to.
The top 1% also have 39 percent of the wealth and rising. The "and rising" means it's pretty clear that the taxes are not enough (and/or wages need to be wildly adjusted), if you believe that we currently have too much wealth inequality.
The most interesting bit is that out of that 10 percentage points growth (60% to 70%) for the 10% wealthiest, 9 percentage points are attributed to the top 1% (23% to 32%)!
So, the rest of the top 10% have remained basically at the same level of (relative) wealth (37% to 38%), and the wealth from the poorest has moved to the top 1%!
So, looking at the top 10% here paints a less bleak picture of where the wealth is being accumulated/moved.
IOW, it's not even the rich getting richer, it's just the super rich!
I'm having trouble parsing what you wrote, but I assume you mean that the paper specifically looked at top 1% as defined by earnings or net worth?
My point is that while we frequently use the 1% as a reference for discussions on inequality, the driving force of wealth accumulation isn't that some people make 350k+, and people understandably get caught up in those semantics.
According to this report (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51846) the average wealth for the top 10% in 2013 was ~$4 Million. Spread equally around everyone that represents a ~25% increase for families in the 50-90th percentile, and over a 1000% increase for families below that. Seems pretty significant to me.
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