Orchestrate Illusions, Super-Pareto

You remember our old friend Pareto, yes?  A Pareto distribution is any economy where the wealthiest 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth.

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.

Those surveyed were equally wide of the mark when it comes to the poor. They estimated that the poorest 20 percent have about 3 percent of the wealth. The actual amount is 0.1 percent. The poorest 40 percent of the population holds just 0.3 percent of the nation's wealth; the poorest 60 percent, about 5 percent.

Mr. King would be shocked to learn that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans today control about a quarter of the nation's riches. That's a 66 percent greater share than they controlled at the close of the Gilded Age - the age of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and the so-called Robber Barons.

The US is a banana republic.  Meanwhile, Republicans complain that Obama is a redistributionist and the "American free market" has done a bang-up job of distributing all this country's wealth to the richest 20%.

Now Republicans want to continue this with even more tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations.  Nice, huh.

[UPDATE]  Steven D has more on this, including this gobsmacker of a chart:

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.