No, he is saying that $1B in wealth (about 400 people) generates $77m (threshold to make list of highest earners) in income assuming a 7.7% rate of return (which seems unrealistically high to me).
It's not visually misleading at all. The point is that the wealthy have taken a vastly disproportionate share of income growth. The vast majority of the income growth in the top quintile is in the top 5%. The majority of growth in the top 5% is in the top 1%. The majority of the growth in the top 1% is in the top 0.1%.
Edit: Also, if we're going to look at changes in net worth, that will also support my argument. Increases in net worth compound over time, which is why fortunes tend to grow. I.E., the entire thesis of Thomas Picketty's book.
The first graphics clearly shows that the 0.1% increased their wealth disproportionately in the recent years. It does not show this for the 9.9%, so I'm not quite able to follow the conclusion.
A better question would be what percent of the wealth do they own? That would be much, much higher. If your investment portfolio doubles, are you richer? Of course. But it doesn't count as income. You're just making money off the backs of the poor whose wages are being depressed in favor of giving more money to capital.
I know that makes sense. I guess I just never realized how many people exist who have that sort of wealth. I know income and wealth are separate things, but making over $75k puts one in the top 25% of US earners.
> 12% of the population will find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution for at least one year
That is just wild. I wish they dove deeper into the data here. The top 1% of earning, based on a quick google, is 1.3m/yr. That's a lot! Are there, say, estate windfalls pushing people around to cause some of those blips?
Also, this article fails to separate income from wealth/assets, which seems to be a common pitfall in this kind of conversation. Many of the people with the most wealth are not those with the most income. So while there appears to be lots of income volatility, I would be interested in seeing the same thing for wealth over time.
I don't know how accurately their wealth is measured, but hiding a billion is not that easy so I will assume it's reasonably close. Anyway, ((15.7 / 15.3) ^ (1/15)) - 1 = 0.17% per year difference in wealth generation and spending per year for 5 people.
I expect they are all playing around with side investments of one sort or another, but they have had plenty of dividends to work with and little to show for it. It's not that I think the government would do all that much better, rather taxing society more to help maintain such wealth has zero benefit from what I can see.
This is a bit misleading. They incorrectly haphazardly swap "income" and "wealth":
The subtitle says "Explore the occupations and industries of the nation’s wealthiest households." Yet the chart note is "The chart counts the number of individual workers living in households with an overall income in the top 1 percent nationwide."
This implies that a retired multimillionaire with a 300K passive income isn't in the wealthiest one percent, and a couple with a negative net worth (e.g. bought a $2 million dollar house that's now only worth a million; and no savings), with two $190K jobs is in the wealthiest one percent. Of course this is nonsense.
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.
So many folks tearing this article apart. I think the point here is that $300k, which the vast majority of income earners will never achieve and whom many in the middle class would consider “rich”, is not actually true wealth.
If anything this article points out the true problem with society - the vast and growing income disparity between the “rich” and the truly rich. There are plenty of folks who can eat every meal out, buy Ferrari’s and shop at Gucci without batting an eye, and despite outrageous expenses grow their savings tremendously per year.
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