Wealth Inequality Is Higher Than Ever

New data confirms what we already knew: the haves have a ton. And the have-nots have next to nothing.

A mansion in New York. TheTurducken / Flickr


Last week, the Federal Reserve released the 2016 version of the Survey of Consumer Finances. I will be doing a lot of work with this data in the coming months. But for starters, I wanted to examine wealth inequality, across a variety of breakdowns.

First, let’s look at the wealth level at each percentile of the wealth distribution. Since wealth is so overwhelmingly concentrated at the top of society, you cannot see much from the chart itself, but you can hover over the line on the graph with your cursor to see the dollar figure at every percentile.

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