[camikazeg]

I hear these kinds of statistics all the time and they are appalling, but I need to understand how they are measured in order to think about the best ways to fix the problem.

There are a lot of people in the US that have plenty of income, but little to no wealth. In other words, their expenses match up with their income. They rent a nice house, have a large loan on their car, some credit card debt, etc. There are a lot of reasonably well off people that have a negative net worth. Would anyone living paycheck to paycheck be considered as having zero wealth? That's half of America [0]. With only 20K in my 401k, I have more wealth than half of the country by that metric.

Also, since we don't have a wealth tax, nobody has to report their personal assets, so how are these numbers calculated?

On the flip side, if you try to measure inequality of income, instead of wealth, some of the wealthiest people on earth can have years of enormous losses that hardly affect their quality of life but would put them on the bottom of the income scale.

[0]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secre...