The United States of America has now gone Super-Pareto.
Researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities surveyed a group of Americans on the subject of income inequality and found people’s preferred model of wealth distribution was that of the Swedes—after being given the choice of sticking with what the United States has to offer these days.When shown the wealth distribution of the U.S. and Sweden’s (without labels), 92% of respondents chose the Swedish one.The research also revealed that Americans “vastly underestimated the actual level of wealth inequality in the United States,” believing that the wealthiest 20% of the population currently controls about 59% of the wealth, when the actual number is closer to 84%.When asked how much of the country’s wealth the richest 20% should hold, respondents said no more than 32%.
You read that right. The latest numbers on wealth inequality shows that the top 20% of the country now controls 84% of the nation's wealth. That full study is here, more on the inequality numbers here.
As you can see, group after group had guessed that the wealthiest 20% of Americans had 55-60% of the wealth in this country and the bottom 40% had about 10% total. They also thought the middle and upper middle class of the country had some 30% of the wealth.
The reality, that the upper class have 84% of the wealth and 180 million or so of us are left fighting over just 4% of the wealth is the kind of thing you'd expect to find in Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.
3 comments:
But hey, you know, they can always eat cake.
See that green sliver at the top of the first chart? That's the American middle class.
Cake is too fucking expensive.
That green sliver is not the middle class. The middle class has been consumed by the super-wealthy.
You said it before. WE HAVE NO MIDDLE CLASS.
Anyways.
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