8. The Big Stretch. Rising incomes among a small group of Americans led to that group breaking away in lifestyle. They bought bigger homes, nicer cars, went to expensive schools, and took fancy vacations.
Nick Wignall • Outline.com
In a particularly illuminating study, the US public were asked how much of the total national wealth each 20% of the US population owned, from the poorest 20% to the wealthiest 20%. They were then asked how much each group should own in an ideal world. They guessed that the wealthiest 20% of Americans owned around 60% of national wealth, but that t
... See morePaul Behrens • The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science
The threshold to be in the top 1 percent was about $600,000 per year, according to a SmartAsset study in 2022.18
Scott Trench • Set for Life: An All-Out Approach to Early Financial Freedom
The bottom 50 percent of the population in the U.S. owns less than 2 percent of total wealth. It used to be 3 or 4 percent 20 years ago; now it’s less than 2 percent. It’s always been very small, in any case, but it’s not going in the right direction. This has all sorts of bad consequences in terms of how you can plan your own life.
David Wallace-Wells • Thomas Piketty Knew This Was Coming
Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, found that an astonishing 95 percent of total income gains during the years 2009 to 2012 were hoovered up by the wealthiest 1 percent.
Martin Ford • Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
Socially enlightened members of the educated elite tend to be disturbed by the widening gap between rich and poor and are therefore made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that their own family income now tops $80,000. Some of them dream of social justice yet went to a college where the tuition costs could feed an entire village in Rwanda for a yea
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