Hard work isn’t enough, the reality of wealth in America

Unfair cannot even describe the wealth distribution in most countries and we have more of the world's richest people living in America so when you take a graph with this particular country you finally see the enormous gap between a few guys and the masses.

This is a screenshot from X, a reputable source

You look at those figures and you understand that wealth is no longer a matter of individual effortsl.

That's $22 trillion versus less than $10 trillion. The top 0.1 percent versus the bottom half. 134,000 households versus 67 million.

The first time I analyzed the details of the magnitude of the gap it didn't even make sense because how do you get your head around that sort of difference?

But it’s not just the magnitude, it’s what people own. The top owns mostly stocks and private businesses. Things that grow passively. You invest, they go up and your wealth increases while you’re sleeping or on vacation or whatever it is that billionairs do when we're not watching them. Their stock market equity alone is worth more than everything owned by the bottom half. I keep repeating that.

For the rest, the big asset is housing, which is ok. Housing is something real, it puts a roof over your head. But it doesn’t grow the same way. It just sort of sits there and holds its value. Appreciates maybe if you’re lucky, maybe not. Beyond that they own next to no stocks, almost no businesses, some retirement accounts maybe and consumer durables which depreciate the second you buy them.

So it’s not just a question of wealth. It’s a question of wealth type. One of them grows the other doesn’t.

One experienced friend of mine bought a plot of land outside of the city three years ago and he keeps telling me it’s going to appreciate, maybe it will. But compare that to someone who bought Tesla three years ago, no comparison. This isn’t a story of effort or brains or who gets up at 5am and works round the clocks.

What makes this so much worse is that it’s a structural story. People discuss inequality as if it’s a moral matter, a matter of fairness or taxes or redistribution and perhaps it just might be. But before that it’s a matter of access to the things that grow. If you don’t have access to the stock market or to businesses then you’re basically treading water however fast you paddle.

I really don’t know how you change that if at all.