This is tautologous. "Wealthy" means mostly "built, and still owns a decent chunk of, a company whose shares are highly valued".
Also, I could, like my parents, own nothing in the stock market, but have a paid off house and decent savings and a state pension, and be doing well. Proportion of capital markets ownership is too skewed a metric to reason about.
No, it's not, and it's a problem that you're thinking this way. A tautology would be "Americans in the top 10% of wealth are wealthier than the bottom 90%." A tautology is necessarily true according to logic.
Logic does not dictate that the top 10% own 90% of the equities. And, in fact, there's a strong argument that societies with extreme inequality in wealth distribution are structurally unsound societies (I don't mean that they're economically unsound, though I'd argue that, too).
> there's a strong argument that societies with extreme inequality in wealth distribution are structurally unsound societies (I don't mean that they're economically unsound, though I'd argue that, too).
This just depends on how you define "structurally unsound" and "economically unsound".
That's still not a tautology just because in practice it is usually true, and is easily disproven as such: Stock values could all nosedive to nothing, and the wealthiest people would still mostly all be the wealthiest due to non-stock assets.
Not that easy. If the wealthy own 90% of the stocks and 90% of their wealth is in stocks, and the stocks disappeared, they may still be wealthy due to the remainder, but still the bulk of the their wealth was in stocks.
The exact percentage is exactly critical informarion.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the 10% own 100% of all net worth. Imagine net worth of 90% of the population is exactly at zero. Do you think democracy would still function, liberty would survive?
The folks at zero would be closer to slaves than to anything we recognise today.