Wealth real and imagined

I first heard about this story from the tweet of a friend now studying at Wharton, which linked here.

This morning the story was covered on NPR’s Morning Edition.

The upshot—made even more graphic by this, uh, graphic—is that wealth is far more concentrated in this country than most people realize. The richest 20% of the people have about 85% of the total wealth. The share of the bottom two quintiles, on the other hand, is so minuscule that it’s practically invisible on the bar chart.

What’s more, when you ask people what distribution of wealth they would prefer, then men, women, Democrats, Republicans, the rich and the poor all favor a much more even distribution than actually exists. Those with the highest income think the rich deserve a bigger slice of the pie, but the slice they suggest is less than 40%—not even half of what the top quintile actually owns.