I'd be curious to see this smoothed out over a few years by individual. For example, in silicon valley, it's typical to have an occasional stock windfall year (due to, say, an IPO).
If 10% of people have one of those every 10 years, then that ends up being the top percent income in these analyses. However, it could be that zero percent of people make that in an average year (or that 0.99% make arbitrarily more than that in an average year).
I wish we stopped equating too 1% incomes with “the top 1%”. People in the top 1% of wealth are much better off than those in the top 1% of income - at a typical “safe withdrawal” rate and the much lower (and avoidable) marginal capital gains taxes vs income taxes, they can take home almost as much after taxes as a top1%-by-income family, if not more, without doing any work at all.
Wealth is also a much more durable measure than income, as very high incomes for many people don’t happen until mid or late career, or they may be one-offs (like from an IPO).
You can be in the top 1% of CA as eg a dual income family in South Bay both working lowish status roles like “senior/staff engineer” or “line manager”. That’s solidly upper middle class in practice until they accumulate wealth. There’s a world of difference between that and how a family with $15m in assets can live
Do you have any statistics to back this up? The census shows that top percentile household wealth at 11m, and top percentile income at 500k.
At current interest rates, 11m in cash would yield 500k/yr in interest, so the top percentile in net worth is also top percentile in income, just from first principles. Of course, over the last two decades interest rates were hovering mostly around 0, so that math doesn't quite work out. People also have their wealth tied up in investments, some of which fared better (S&P 500), some of which did worse.
Note that it doesn't really matter if that net worth is in real estate or in equities, both REITs and the broad market indices have returned about 11% per annum over the last 20 years.
More than one in ten american households have net worth >1m.
Your last sentence is more concerned about social status than about wealth. Poor families can spend in high-status ways, and vice versa. Social status is weakly correlated with both income and wealth at best.
You can't just point to billionaires and see that they have almost 0 income. There are only a few thousand billionaires in the world, enough for each and every one to be individually tracked. They are not included in these statistics, because again there's only literally thousands of them. They're so far into the top percentile they don't touch the statistics here.
Agreed. Jeff Bezo technically makes a pretty modest annual income (in 2019, it was reported his annual income was about $81,000), but obviously he's extremely wealthy. An "income" is the price laborers get for selling their labor. The capital-owning class, the people that buy that labor, build their wealth through other means.
Substantiate please. Give me some links or statistics at least. Your claim is essentially that net-worth inequality is much worse than the income inequality. To me that is non-obvious and very likely wrong given that high net worth individuals are very rare and high income people somewhat common.
Robert Reich, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, put a course online this year with all of the stats you seek. Yes, wealth inequality makes income inequality seem like an easy to measure proxy yet ultimately misguided metric.
As soon as I saw "visual capitalist" and the word "inequality" I knew with absolute certainty that they would be looking solely at income inequality and ignoring wealth.
It's a neat sleight of hand for misrepresenting the true level of inequality in our society. Income inequality is higher than it should be, wealth inequality is staggering.
Substantiate please. Give me some links or statistics at least. Your claim is essentially that net-worth inequality is much worse than the income inequality. To me that is non-obvious and very likely wrong given that high net worth individuals are very rare and high income people somewhat common.
Exactly. Just by thinking that salary is the right metric reveals one doesn’t even understand the finance of the truly wealthy. It’s not even the right question to ask. If you have a “salary” that right there means you’re a working stiff and are not part of the uppercrust. Truly wealthy people don’t “work” and don’t have “income” in that sense.
Instead they just have a large portfolio of assets that grow in value. They’re free to draw what they wish to live the lifestyle they wish.
The way I think about it is this: there are two types of people in this world. Those who have to go to work every day to produce income, or else they’re fucked. And there’s people who simply do not have to work.
In this sense, a surgeon is really not that different than a grocery clerk. They both have to get up everyday and go through the grind or else they’re fucked. In a sense they’re in the same class. They’re both beholden to the 9-5 lifestyle.
In contrast the truly wealthy, can just do whatever they want with their days. They do not have to be anywhere. This level of freedom is the major distinguishing factor. Worrying about the doctor’s salary vs the clerk’s is a distraction. They’re both in the same boat.
This chart is annual income, not net worth – in Los Angeles, for example, the median 2bd starter home is over $1 million, while in many states $300k is enough for a 3-4bd home with a yard and a garage.
If 10% of people have one of those every 10 years, then that ends up being the top percent income in these analyses. However, it could be that zero percent of people make that in an average year (or that 0.99% make arbitrarily more than that in an average year).