The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52T (2025)
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
What we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution of the total wealth among groups, which the article touches upon here:
> The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter, compared with 28% in 2000.
> The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter while the bottom 90% held 33%.
like % of people with:
- a washing machine
- access to clean water
- more than one car or house
- measures of access to health care, mental health care, etc
I think there might be increases or declines most people don't realize
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, which is used to rank countries into four tiers of human development.
A lot of the time I'd prefer to see "HDI recalculated without income" because income per capita doesn't seem like a direct indicator of human development. It's more of a proxy measure. Of course, I could say the same thing about how it measures education. Educational outcomes (like highly developed literacy) are better than how many years of schooling someone has. But these better measurements are also probably harder to collect across a broad group of countries.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
You provided zero evidence for that claim. Let's look at the raw numbers, percentages first, as you suggested: :
share of wealth of top 0.1% : 2000 - 10.35%, 2025 - 14.4%
share of wealth of top 10% : 2000 - 62.6%, 2025 - 68.01%
share of wealth of bottom 50% : 2000 - 3.2% , 2025 - 2.4%
> It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes.
This claim is mathematical malpractice - the numbers clearly show that the top is going up while the bottom is going down... percentage-wise! Mathematically, the up-side is limited by 100% and the down-side by 0%, there's no way this can be "regularity broken", ad infinitum, it will end with the top at 100 and the bottom at 0, aka nothing left to trickle up.
> What we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution of the total wealth among groups... [a couple of selective and confusing quotes]
I did what you urged us to do, but the conclusion is the opposite of your "nothing interesting to see here".
1. Nominal dollars held is a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting happens, therefore it being "broken" tells us very little.
2. Instead, what we should be tracking and concerned-about is the proportional distribution.
I didn't expect either to be controversial, but somehow you've created something wildly different in your mind in order to be excitedly outraged over it.
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> You provided zero evidence for that claim.
In a thread about economics, you should already be aware that (A) inflation is typical and (B) the American economy is typically growing rather than shrinking. If you need to cry "SOURCE!?" over these concepts, then something is wrong.
> the numbers clearly show that the top is going up while the bottom is going down... percentage-wise!
Yes, looking at proportional amounts is exactly what I told you to do, and it's consistent with the numbers I quoted from the article showing an uptick for the 1%. I just don't know why you're acting like it's a surprise.
> there's no way [percentage records] can be "regularity broken", ad infinitum
Oh, I see, you've just imagined-up a dumb thing nobody said. I explicitly referred to the headline, and headline is in dollars, not percentages.
Incidentally, you're also wrong: There are infinitely-many opportunities to exceed a real-number by infinitely small amounts. (As you go from ~17% to 100%.)
> the conclusion is the opposite of your "nothing interesting to see here".
*looks down at notepad* Is the "conclusion" inside the room with us now?
Can you point to it's exact-words, so that the rest of us can see it?
> Can you point to it's exact-words, so that the rest of us can see it?
>>It's defines a "record" that will get regularly broken by default even when nothing interesting changes.
> There are infinitely-many opportunities to exceed a real-number by infinitely small amounts.
All of them existing only in the abstract and none of them applicable to changes of real data. What quantum theory did you study?
Looking at what you wrote, any further discussions are pointless. Have a nice day/night/etc.
1. Article: "The neon sign is lit, which shows the convenience store is open."
2. Terr: "No, the neon sign is always on, even when the convenience store is closed. Instead, you should go look through those windows, see the cashier inside?
3. BigBadFeline : "OMG why are you saying the store is closed? It's open! You're crazy."
I think the excessive use of absolute numbers in this article does the author and readers a disservice. It's like describing a chess game and saying "after five moves and fifty million possible games,..."
Yes, it's worth noting that the wealth at the top increased faster than the wealth at the bottom (7% > 6%). And it compounds so that alone can increase the wealth gap.
Especially as a "new record" threshold in nominal dollars.
"January 1st: Record for highest Gregorian calendar year smashed, with upstart 2026 snatching the title from former champ 2025! Our panel of experts analyzes what this completely unexpected shakeup means for Time, and how it may impact you and your family."
top 0.1% $23T (those with $46M)
top 1% $52T
top 10% $113T (those with $2M)
Zero sum game mindset is tiring.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
I say "hopeful" because it suggests we can develop new arrangements that are an improvement on the old ones, without the tougher-problem of eliminating greed.
Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds
But, when we get to these scales, where a very small number of individuals controls large amounts of social resources, it becomes a society-wide efficiency issue. Solitary individuals cannot allocate capital as well as large collections of people can. A thriving startup ecosystem is better than a single person picking winners and losers.
When you have individuals controlling huge swathes of resources, you get weird outcomes, like the Metaverse or WeWork or the Line. These things are monumental wastes of human effort, and they naturally arise when the distribution of wealth becomes too extreme. And it gets worse and worse when they begin suppressing private enterprise by leveraging the state, which is certainly already happening (see: tech execs paying $1m to stand behind DJT at the inauguration).
I don't care about the individual "The 1%". I don't care who they are, how craven and greedy, how creepy, how ugly, how disgusting. I don't care whether they are going to heaven or hell. What I care about is that they are burning vast amounts of human potential on things that don't benefit anyone at all. They're wasting huge amounts of time. I think about this every time I have to wait 3h on hold with a huge, bloated, inefficient corporation, whose owner spends a quarter of their time schmoozing in Washington D.C: a startup should be there competing, preventing me from wasting my time!
Like, both of those things can’t be true. If it’s fake money, why do we care that some people have a ton of it? If Tesla is only worth as much as GM, Musk’s share of it is only worth $11 billion, not $200 billion+. Even if you confiscate that it’ll run the federal government for less than a day.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
"The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter ... The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter...", so subtracting again, the other 9% has has 38% of total household wealth.
When the SV techbros in the top 10% say "eat the rich", they're volunteering themselves to be on the menu too. Don't let 'em say otherwise.
Your response and the sibling are exactly what I'm talking about: "Eat the rich but of course we don't mean us!" If you think the proletariat is not going to see right through that, think again.
When people talk about the 1% they almost always mean the 0.1%>
Despite working in tech, my solidarity is not with the tech bros. By all means, tax the shit out of my wealth bracket.
I hate when only part of the criteria are provided. Arrives like this need a table. If they don't have it, it calls into question whether they should be writing the article.
Despite the recent faster growth at the top, the total shares of wealth held by the upper echelon has remained fairly stable for decades. The top 1% held 29% of total household wealth in the second quarter, compared with 28% in 2000. The top 10% held 67% of total household wealth in the quarter while the bottom 90% held 33%.
As an extreme case, let's look at the top 3 billionaires in 2000 and 2025 respectively.
2000 Gates, Ellison, Allen $135 billion vs. $42.0 trillion ≈0.32 %
2025 Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg $957 billion vs. $172.9 trillion ≈0.55 %
Can we reach the end state where they just have 100% and society collapses? It's just painful and frankly inhumane, to let this last part drag out for so long.