Perhaps the Federal
Reserve Board's data is not accurate,
or perhaps it's not meant to be used in this way, to address questions of distribution. If anyone knows anything
about this, I'd love to hear from you.
We should always be prepared to be surprised by data, especially in areas like this. It's a useful exercise, for all kinds of reasons, to set
aside any skepticism and really think about what the implications would be if the data were absolutely accurate.
(You might discover in this way, for example, that the world is round, or that mass bends space.)
Where are all these people? Given
the odds, I should personally know at least a few of them, and yet I'm sure I don't. Even if the threshold were
lowered to $10 million, and maybe even to $1 million. It's clear that they are running in circles that never touch
mine.
The Federal Reserve Board's data is almost all there is to go on, and
that's a shame. They've only been conducting the survey since 1986, so
it's impossible to get a long term picture of the changing distribution of wealth, and there's no data I can find
at all about other countries. Someone needs to start an organization devoted to collecting or extrapolating this
data that is becoming so important to our times.
Well, one other possibility is the Census,
but their public reports don't divide up the percentiles nearly enough to be useful. (When you only divide the
population up into four or five parts, the unequal distribution of wealth is not nearly as apparent.) Raw census
data is supposedly available, but I haven't figured out yet how to get at it. (This would be another good task
for the abovementioned organization.)
One thing I did learn from the
Census is that 12
percent of the population lives in poverty right now. That's one in every
eight people. Based on my own circles, that's almost as hard to believe as the one out of a hundred with a net
worth more than $110 million, so maybe the latter is not so far fetched after all?