So…a “fun” reminder about the wealth gap. If you’re in the top 0.1% of wealth in the US, you’re still closer to homeless than you are to the billionaire+ class.
A source I found puts the top 0.1% at $64 million net worth (link) And the difference between 64 million and a billion is about a billion.
Maybe closer on the chart, but you can’t pretend that the actual lived experiences between homelessness and $64 million in the bank aren’t almost as different as they can possibly get.
The lived experience is definitely very different. But if the wealthiest group was only worth hundreds of millions, we might be able to avoid having any homeless.
I posted because people tend to have trouble internalizing just how big the wealth gap actually is. The brain can’t really conceptualize how big a “million”, “billion”, or “trillion” actually is. It leads to a lot of misconceptions (another example, national budgets). I hope little nuggets like this will stick in people’s brains to help them engage better with large numbers.
Edit: here’s more data on the wealth gap
According to one source I found, there are 996 US billionaire+ that control $9.5 trillion. The bottom half controls $4.3 trillion.
If we pretend that 171,469,137 people are able to organize to the same degree as 996 people, and that those 171,469,137 people don’t need to cover necessities with their wealth, the billionaire+ still have an outsized financial impact on politics and power structures.
So…a “fun” reminder about the wealth gap. If you’re in the top 0.1% of wealth in the US, you’re still closer to homeless than you are to the billionaire+ class.
A source I found puts the top 0.1% at $64 million net worth (link) And the difference between 64 million and a billion is about a billion.
Maybe closer on the chart, but you can’t pretend that the actual lived experiences between homelessness and $64 million in the bank aren’t almost as different as they can possibly get.
The lived experience is definitely very different. But if the wealthiest group was only worth hundreds of millions, we might be able to avoid having any homeless.
I posted because people tend to have trouble internalizing just how big the wealth gap actually is. The brain can’t really conceptualize how big a “million”, “billion”, or “trillion” actually is. It leads to a lot of misconceptions (another example, national budgets). I hope little nuggets like this will stick in people’s brains to help them engage better with large numbers.
Edit: here’s more data on the wealth gap
According to one source I found, there are 996 US billionaire+ that control $9.5 trillion. The bottom half controls $4.3 trillion.
If we pretend that 171,469,137 people are able to organize to the same degree as 996 people, and that those 171,469,137 people don’t need to cover necessities with their wealth, the billionaire+ still have an outsized financial impact on politics and power structures.
Sources:
I love you for this
Depressingly after Occupy Wall Street, now it’s not the 99%/1%, it’s the 99.9%/0.1%.