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The top 10% of households by wealth had $6.9 million on average. As a group, they held 67% of total household wealth. The bottom 50% of households by wealth had $51,000 on average.
The Great Recession also caused a drop of 36% in median household wealth, but a drop of only 11% for the top 1%, further widening the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 99%. [ 16 ] [ 15 ] [ 17 ] According to PolitiFact and other sources, in 2011, the 400 wealthiest Americans had more wealth than half of all Americans combined.
A December 2011 Gallup poll found a decline in the number of Americans who rated reducing the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor as extremely or very important (21 percent of Republicans, 43 percent of independents, and 72 percent of Democrats). [191] Only 45% see the gap as in need of fixing, while 52% do not.
BLS explained the gap between productivity and compensation can be divided into two components, the effect of which varies by industry: 1) Recalculating the gap using an industry-specific inflation adjustment ("industry deflator") rather than consumption (CPI); and 2) The change in labor's share of income, defined as how much of a business ...
Piketty and Saez (2014) note that there are important differences between income and wealth inequality dynamics. First, wealth concentration is always much higher than income concentration. The top 10 percent of wealth share typically falls in the 60 to 90 percent range of all wealth, whereas the top 10 percent income share is in the 30 to 50 ...
A study by the Brandeis University Institute on Assets and Social Policy which followed the same sets of families for 25 years found that there are vast differences in wealth across racial groups in the United States. The wealth gap between Caucasian and African-American families studied nearly tripled, from $85,000 in 1984 to $236,500 in 2009.
Economic inequality is an umbrella term for a) income inequality or distribution of income (how the total sum of money paid to people is distributed among them), b) wealth inequality or distribution of wealth (how the total sum of wealth owned by people is distributed among the owners), and c) consumption inequality (how the total sum of money spent by people is distributed among the spenders).
Classical economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo were mainly concerned with factor income distribution, that is, the distribution of income between the main factors of production, land, labour and capital. It is often related to wealth distribution, although separate factors influence wealth inequality.