Comparatively, you need to earn $663,164 to be in the top 1%, and more than $3M to be in the top 0.1%.
I just want to highlight this to remind that the top 10% is by far not made up exclusively of ultra-rich individuals like people on internet like to believe.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...
It paints a pretty poor picture of what is possible. I met many uneducated immigrants on a fish processing boat in the Bering Sea making 10k a month, a job usually begging for people. They would show me pictures of their wives and children living well.
The former is less meaningful as it ignores your cost of living.
The majority of people who earn a top 1% income only manage to do so for a short period.
As a consequence the overlap between top 1% by income and by wealth is small. They are (broadly speaking) different groups.
It's VERY effective.
Anyway, if anything the distribution based on wealth would even more starkly be hyper-focused at the top, the people in the 10-9% range aren't exactly sitting on mountains of gold.
90th percentile 65 year old has perhaps $1M+ in accumulated property wealth and retirement savings.
There is some generational inequality at work, but that 65 year old also had ~zero at 21. The 90th percentile 21 year old will likely be doing very well by the time they're 65, hard to say whether better or worse than today's cohort.
But in any case, with longer lifespans, many/most won't see inheritance until their 50s, 60s, even 70s, long past what are arguably the most expensive years (buying a home, raising kids and so on). Maybe in time to pay college fees, depending on when they have kids. Even for the relatively wealthy, it's the luck of the draw - healthcare and senior care costs many hundreds of thousands for some, and virtually nothing for others.
Vacant en masse is happening a fair bit there are even some near where i live.
Mostly it's more people renting though.
The war on affordable housing is all around.
Where do you live? Even manhattan has vacancy rates barely above the 3% structural minimum and thats the poster child for "rich people leaving property vacant" complaints.
The problem really is that too many homeowners refuse to allow anything other than SFHs to be built near them.
There's two ways to stay the richest man in the world:
a) Get more money.
b) Stop people from getting more money than you.
And I suppose c) Do both. If that's what you are about.
A lot of people characterize corporations as a sociopath because it expresses a lot of clinical markers. I think if you frame the economy as war, you'll find similar markers. People are exhausted, shell shocked, constantly insecure, attrition or the feeling of attrition (feeling of no progress). PTSD from this everlasting war.
American households have a good amount of discretionary spending, but for the ticket items that actually matter such as quality housing, healthy food and healthcare my money stretches a lot further in Western Europe, for median household income that is.
Even if adjusted by all those things the median American is doing very well while the Japanese are about on par with Southern/Eastern Europeans these days.