The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52T (2025)
cnbc.comThis headline formulation is statistical malpractice that news companies do to get clicks. It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes.
What we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution of the total wealth among groups, which the article touches upon here:
> The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter, compared with 28% in 2000.
> The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter while the bottom 90% held 33%.
That's only because you're using broad strokes. If you look at the top 0.1% and the top 0.01% and the top 0.001% you'll see that as you go to the extreme end the share of the total household wealth does tend upwards. Please see my other post for some numbers.
I wonder if there could be a way to measure things like prosperity or civilization level.
like % of people with:
- a washing machine
- access to clean water
- more than one car or house
- measures of access to health care, mental health care, etc
I think there might be increases or declines most people don't realize
Isn't this HDI?
HDI captures some of these attributes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.
A lot of the time I'd prefer to see "HDI recalculated without income" because income per capita doesn't seem like a direct indicator of human development. It's more of a proxy measure. Of course, I could say the same thing about how it measures education. Educational outcomes (like highly developed literacy) are better than how many years of schooling someone has. But these better measurements are also probably harder to collect across a broad group of countries.
> This headline formulation is statistical malpractice
You provided zero evidence for that claim. Let's look at the raw numbers, percentages first, as you suggested: :
share of wealth of top 0.1% : 2000 - 10.35%, 2025 - 14.4%
share of wealth of top 10% : 2000 - 62.6%, 2025 - 68.01%
share of wealth of bottom 50% : 2000 - 3.2% , 2025 - 2.4%
> It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes.
This claim is mathematical malpractice - the numbers clearly show that the top is going up while the bottom is going down... percentage-wise! Mathematically, the up-side is limited by 100% and the down-side by 0%, there's no way this can be "regularity broken", ad infinitum, it will end with the top at 100 and the bottom at 0, aka nothing left to trickle up.
> What we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution of the total wealth among groups... [a couple of selective and confusing quotes]
I did what you urged us to do, but the conclusion is the opposite of your "nothing interesting to see here".
Wow, I-don't-even. My short comment contained only two claims:
1. Nominal dollars held is a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting happens, therefore it being "broken" tells us very little.
2. Instead, what we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution.
I didn't expect either to be controversial, but somehow you've created something wildly different in your mind in order to be excitedly outraged over it.
____________________________________________________________
> You provided zero evidence for that claim.
In a thread about economics, you should already be aware that (A) inflation is typical and (B) the American economy is typically growing rather than shrinking. If you need to cry "SOURCE!?" over these concepts, then something is wrong.
> the numbers clearly show that the top is going up while the bottom is going down... percentage-wise!
Yes, looking at proportional amounts is exactly what I told you to do, and it's consistent with the numbers I quoted from the article showing an uptick for the 1%. I just don't know why you're acting like it's a surprise.
> there's no way [percentage records] can be "regularity broken", ad infinitum
Oh, I see, you've just imagined-up a dumb thing nobody said. I explicitly referred to the headline, and headline is in dollars, not percentages.
Incidentally, you're also wrong: There are infinitely-many opportunities to exceed a real-number by infinitely small amounts. (As you go from ~17% to 100%.)
> the conclusion is the opposite of your "nothing interesting to see here".
*looks down at notepad* Is the "conclusion" inside the room with us now?
Can you point to it's exact-words, so that the rest of us can see it?
Oh no, you were so right... or so you've convinced yourself.
> Can you point to it's exact-words, so that the rest of us can see it?
>>It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes.
> There are infinitely-many opportunities to exceed a real-number by infinitely small amounts.
All of them existing only in the abstract and none of them applicable to changes of real data. What quantum theory did you study?
Looking at what you wrote, any further discussions are pointless. Have a nice day/night/etc.
A drama in three parts.
1. Article: "The neon sign is lit, which shows the convenience store is open."
2. Terr: "No, the neon sign is always on, even when the convenience store is closed. Instead, you should go look through those windows, see the cashier inside?
3. BigBadFeline : "OMG why are you saying the store is closed? It's open! You're crazy."
If you're interested, the federal reserve has a page tracking that kind of information over time:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
> All wealth groups saw gains over the past year, with the net worth of the bottom half of Americans increasing 6% over the past 12 months, according to the Fed data. Yet the growth has been fastest for those at the very top. The top 1% have seen their wealth increase by $4 trillion over the past year, an increase of 7%
I think the excessive use of absolute numbers in this article does the author and readers a disservice. It's like describing a chess game and saying "after five moves and fifty million possible games,..."
Yes, it's worth noting that the wealth at the top increased faster than the wealth at the bottom (7% > 6%). And it compounds so that alone can increase the wealth gap.
> excessive use of absolute numbers in this article
Especially as a "new record" threshold in nominal dollars.
"January 1st: Record for highest Gregorian calendar year smashed, with upstart 2026 snatching the title from former champ 2025! Our panel of experts analyzes what this completely unexpected shakeup means for Time, and how it may impact you and your family."
Reminds me of one of my favorite resources that explains wealth distribution. Not sure when it was last updated, but the visualization using stacks of bills is nice.
It seems there is a rule of thumb: the top 10% holds half of the assets.
top 0.1% $23T (those with $46M)
top 1% $52T
top 10% $113T (those with $2M)
Better calculate the mean not avg.
This world has enough for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed - Mahatma Gandhi
The hopeful/depressing thing is that it's not necessarily greed. Or at least, not only greed. It's easy to construct simple economic models that lead to the same outcome, even where all entities are equal in every way except their balance amount.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
I say "hopeful" because it suggests we can develop new arrangements that are an improvement on the old ones, without the tougher-problem of eliminating greed.
These sorts of quotes from Gandhi and other INC leaders would be more meaningful had the INC not embraced the economic system that kept a majority of Indians in destitute poverty for decades post independence. Meanwhile they castigated the system whose even partial adoption has managed to lift more indians from desperation.
For things like food and building materials for shelter, the world does produce enough for everyone with the willingness to give, only political dysfunction prevents the needy from receiving.
Its okay for people's wealth to increase as long as everyone else's is also increasing.
Zero sum game mindset is tiring.
Related:
Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds
This is the more important statistic!
Is that really saying much? Anyone have the shape of the distribution? I'm thinking many people have negative or close to zero net worth. If you have a dollar to your name, you might be richer than the bottom 48% of humanity combined.
Wealth reporting in the press is so bad it seems like WWE-style entertainment for people who like money more than they like men in tights.
The dollar is devaluing and the rich keep hard assets.
That's approximately ~15.3M USD per person in the top 1% assuming 340 million americans
correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it just 1% of Americans, not globally?
You're 100% right, thanks! Updated my comment.
EDIT: Sorry, thought that was $15 million per American.
top 1%. So 52e12 / (0.01 * 340e6). I'm betting the mean and median are quite different.
IMO, the issue of 1% wealth is not an ethical one. I don't care how much money anyone makes, I don't think it's unethical for some people to have more and some people to have less.
But, when we get to these scales, where a very small number of individuals controls large amounts of social resources, it becomes a society-wide efficiency issue. Solitary individuals cannot allocate capital as well as large collections of people can. A thriving startup ecosystem is better than a single person picking winners and losers.
When you have individuals controlling huge swathes of resources, you get weird outcomes, like the Metaverse or WeWork or the Line. These things are monumental wastes of human effort, and they naturally arise when the distribution of wealth becomes too extreme. And it gets worse and worse when they begin suppressing private enterprise by leveraging the state, which is certainly already happening (see: tech execs paying $1m to stand behind DJT at the inauguration).
I don't care about the individual "The 1%". I don't care who they are, how craven and greedy, how creepy, how ugly, how disgusting. I don't care whether they are going to heaven or hell. What I care about is that they are burning vast amounts of human potential on things that don't benefit anyone at all. They're wasting huge amounts of time. I think about this every time I have to wait 3h on hold with a huge, bloated, inefficient corporation, whose owner spends a quarter of their time schmoozing in Washington D.C: a startup should be there competing, preventing me from wasting my time!
I wonder what the numbers look like without stocks. On that front, the cognitive dissonance is kind of interesting. On one hand, people say that Elon Musk has 700 billion dollars and we should tax it to pay for free healthcare. On the other hand, people say that Tesla isn’t worth that much, and Elon didn’t create much value.
Like, both of those things can’t be true. If it’s fake money, why do we care that some people have a ton of it? If Tesla is only worth as much as GM, Musk’s share of it is only worth $11 billion, not $200 billion+. Even if you confiscate that it’ll run the federal government for less than a day.
One reason you may want to care about this "fake money" is the buy, borrow, die tax avoidance scheme you can run if you're asset rich [1]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
"Buy, borrow, die" is simply not a thing. It's a half-baked idea invented by academics, who don't realize that it's just not viable in practice. Billionaires do not actually utilize it[1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
In that case, isn't the correct analysis how much money is borrowed? If Musk is borrowing $500 million, that won't fund the government very long.
What should probably happen is the gains on any stock used for collateral in a loan are automatically realized for tax purposes.
That would make sense.
"The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52 trillion ... The total wealth of the top 10% ... reached a record $113 trillion", so subtracting, the other 9% has $61 trillion.
"The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter ... The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter...", so subtracting again, the other 9% has has 38% of total household wealth.
When the SV techbros in the top 10% say "eat the rich", they're volunteering themselves to be on the menu too. Don't let 'em say otherwise.
This is exactly what I've said for a decade.
When people talk about the 1% they almost always mean the 0.1%>
A $300k/yr "tech bro" lives a life much closer to someone making $50k than someone making $50m
Perhaps but that $300k/yr tech bro is still making 6 times the median US individual income. It's actually ~$400k/yr for an ordinary L5 SWE at Google or SDE III at Amazon, or 8x the median US individual income. Surely they will be willing to contribute their fair share out of solidarity and, if not, the proletariat can knock on their door to remind them.
W2 employees do already contribute far more of their income vs the ownership class that has an array of loans, loopholes, and tax-advantaged accounts (all cap gains, for example) at their disposal.
If somebody is making $400,000/year, they're contributing a little over $100,000 in income taxes. You don't think that's a fair share?
If you ask the 50% of the US public that makes $50,000 / year (median US individual income) or less whether paying twice they make in income taxes, leaving six times what they make as after-tax income, is a fair share, what do you think they are going to say?
Your response and the sibling are exactly what I'm talking about: "Eat the rich but of course we don't mean us!" If you think the proletariat is not going to see right through that, think again.
Yes. And?
Despite working in tech, my solidarity is not with the tech bros. By all means, tax the shit out of my wealth bracket.
So if the top 10% is $2m net worth, then what's the 1%? Are we supposed to mentally extrapolate?
I hate when only part of the criteria are provided. Arrives like this need a table. If they don't have it, it calls into question whether they should be writing the article.
It still has ways to go before it reaches Bastille levels
It’s almost flat lining. I’m pleasantly surprised.
Despite the recent faster growth at the top, the total shares of wealth held by the upper echelon has remained fairly stable for decades. The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter, compared with 28% in 2000. The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter while the bottom 90% held 33%.
I think this is just because wealth distribution is a powerlaw with extreme concentration at the far end. For example in this graph you can see a trend, the closer to the top, the steeper the line.
As an extreme case, let's look at the top 3 billionaires in 2000 and 2025 respectively.
2000 Gates, Ellison, Allen $135 billion vs. $42.0 trillion ≈0.32 %
2025 Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg $957 billion vs. $172.9 trillion ≈0.55 %
I didn’t know that, I would’ve guessed we’re pretty close already. What would that level be?
Well of course. Their wealth is a product of multiplication while mine is a sum of addition.
Can we reach the end state where they just have 100% and society collapses? It's just painful and frankly inhumane, to let this last part drag out for so long.