Forget the 1%–mere peasants–the real wealth lies with the 0.1%. From a study late last year by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (click for larger image):
Note we are talking about wealth. This is important because most studies of the 1% focus on income. Wealth is difficult to measure, especially for the uber-rich, which is why this is a landmark study. The authors backed out their wealth estimates using investment income tax return records. In the process, you can see that those poor 1% to 0.5% have been struggling. Forget the squeezed middle, next up is the squeezed upper middle class and then the squeezed lower upper class (click for larger image)?
Seriously, the charts suggest the precariousness of the game the super rich are playing. Immense wealth brings immense political power, at least in the United States. But as you eliminate more and more cohorts from the winners’ enclosure, even the most well-financed lobbying machine will start to struggle.
And the mechanism behind this wealth concentration? Saez is a long-term collaborator on inequality questions with Thomas Picketty of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” fame. From a paper the two did together on income inequality (together with Anthony Atkinson):
So we have an ever-growing share of income by the 0.1%. But the income edge of the 0.1% then starts compounding away as return on investment, which then gets passed on to children and grandchildren if the tax regime permits (which it currently does). And– following Piketty’s iron law of inequality–when r (the return on investment) is larger than g (economic growth), wealth inequality explodes. What eventually stops this process is war, revolution, or, more prosaically, government redistribution. We shall see how this cycle ends.
Risk and Well-Being 