If the top 10% of Americans own 80% of the wealth, does that mean 1 in 10 people I see on the street have significantly more money than me?
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If you took every single American, put them in a big mixer bin, and then used a crane to fish out 10 of them at random, you would *expect* to find one of them to have a significant amount of money compared to the others. You may or may not actually get that result due to luck of the draw, but if you repeated this over and over, you’d average that amount.
Just walking down any street, though, it depends a lot on who actually visits that street. If it’s a back alley in a small town in the Midwest, you probably won’t meet any people who make a lot. But if it’s Wall Street in New York City, probably *everyone* there makes quite a bit.
The people with significantly more money do not have a habit of walking the same streets as you, if they are to be found on any street. They live in gated communities and hire people to do their chores. If you have an average job then your manager will be definition have an above average job. And if you can imagine someone managing nine other workers they make a pretty descent amount of money. Enough that they can buy a house in a descent neighborhood, buy a couple of nice cars, pay for deliveries, etc. But they are at best in the lower part of those 10%. They have a boss as well who makes even more money. And people work as managers in above average work such as law firms, accountants offices, investment firms, etc. So you start to see a lot of wealth being accumulated among these people.
If 1% own 79% of the wealth then 10% owing 80% could still be true since the 1% is part of the 10%.
In this scenario you would not expect 1 in 10 people you see on the street to have significantly more money than you.
No, because of a few things:
1) It depends where you are on the spectrum. If you’re wealthier than average, this won’t hold true for you.
2) It depends on what you mean by “wealth” and “money”. “Wealth” tends to be defined as net worth, meaning assets minus liabilities (or, “stuff you have” minus “stuff you owe”). If you make $100K a year, but your living expenses are also $100K a year, you’ll have little to no net worth or “wealth”, whereas someone making $50K a year who saves or invests half their income would be “wealthier”. The biggest example of this is homeownership, which contributes a lot to people’s wealth. A person who owns a house is going to show as a lot wealthier than someone who lives a more luxurious lifestyle, but doesn’t own anything permanent.
3) Wealth is concentrated very differently based on location. In particular, people are wealthier in or near cities and along the coasts. It’s not like 10% of people living in trailer parks are secret millionaires. So if you’re walking down Hollywood Boulevard, most people are probably going to be wealthier than you. But if you’re walking around a low income village in Kentucky, you may be one of the wealthiest people there.
If you had a true representation of all Americans on any given street, yes. But who is actually on the street depends heavily on your location. You are far more likely to find a billionaire in the Hamptons or Beverly Hills than in most other cities in the US. Go to most small towns and your chances of finding one of the top 10% are probably non-existent. They’re just not there.
depends on what part of town you’re in.
people tend to self segregate themselves. so if you’re walking around a poor part of town, then probably not. but if you go to Aspen, or walk around Beverly hills, or maybe some parts of Manhatten, then yeah prob most people you see are wealthier than you.
Not likely, since people of similar socioeconomic classes tend to live in the same areas.
i.e. Rich people live in very wealthy areas/neighbourhoods where they hardly ever even have to look at “the poors”; they’re not slumming it with the rest of us plebs.
First, a clarifying point. Wealth is a complicated concept. It’s typically not just money sitting in a bank account, especially for very wealthy people. It’s houses, stocks, businesses, and other properties. It can also be reduced by debt. All this means that someone can have significantly more *wealth* than you while not having significantly more *money*. For an ordinary American, this could be because they own their home but are living on a fixed income.
From a pure stats perspective, what you want to know is your *percentile* in the distribution of wealth. If you are at the 73rd percentile of wealth, 73% of people have less wealth than you, and 27% have more, though some of them will only have a bit more money, rather than “significantly more”.
Because wealth is difficult to calculate, we know a lot less about its distribution than income. It’s also standard to think of wealth at the household level, which can mean splitting it across many different people. The Census put out a report with a rough distribution of household wealth last year:
10th Percentile: $0
25th Percentile: $16,650
50th Percentile: $166,900
75th Percentile: $604,900
90th Percentile: $1,623,00
So about 1 in 10 people has no wealth to speak of (renting, no savings, cheap car, maybe significant debts), the next 2 people have some savings but no significant housing wealth. The next 6 start to get into 6-figures, probably much of which is in their house. The last 1 is a millionaire.
It’s only true if you assume that wealthy people and not wealthy people are equally likely to walk the same streets at the same time as you. But it is not true. The top 10% wealthy people are much more unlikely to be on the street when you are.
Kindof depends on where you live. If you’re in Brewton, AL then probably not. It also depends on how much money you have. If you are barely scraping by, then it is likely more than 1 in 10 in most places. A homeless person is likely to meet 9 out of 10 people with more money than they have at any given time.
That’s the problem with statistics. They don’t really capture the specifics of individual situations. In reality, that top 10% is stratified also, with the top 10% of them owning a larger portion of the wealth than the bottom 10%.
Finally, wealth isn’t exactly the same as money. Most really wealthy people have most of their wealth tied up in real estate and other investments (so they can make even more money) and don’t normally have a lot of cash lying around. This is why non-wealthy people talk about how much money they have (for example, in the bank or a big roll of cash in their pocket) while wealthy people speak of their net worth…that takes into account all of the non-monetary things that contribute to their wealth.
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