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Wealth inequality

Saturday 4th of May 2024

Wealth inequality According to Knight Frank [the global property consultancy], the threshold to join Monaco's wealthiest 1 per cent is $7.9m, the highest in the world; second-placed Switzerland has a threshold of $5.1m. … In the next four years,  the number of people worth $30m or more will have grown by 141,055, collectively worth more than $4.23tn, according to Knight Frank. Financial Times, May 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality According to Pew [Research Center], the gap in wealth between upper- income households and lower- and middle-income households in 2016 was the highest since the Federal Reserve began collecting such data in 1983. There are also signs of greater strain on lower-income white households, many of which voted for Mr Trump last year, with 17 per cent of them having a net worth of zero or below. Financial Times, November 13, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group [the 0.1 percent] held 22 percent of America's wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963. If you're looking for the kind of money that can buy elections, you'll find it inside the top 0.1 percent alone. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality All wealth is collective by nature in the sense that it relies on the work of hundreds, thousands, millions of engineers, technicians, the accumulation of knowledge.  Then, private property is a social construction that we invent in order to organize economic and social relations. It’s a very useful social invention as long as you keep under control how much you can accumlate, how much power you can concentrate, etc. But none of these assets are their  assets. They are a product of a collective process. No one invented anything by himself or herself. Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality American elites have stored more wealth than they can consume. This creates three problems for everyone else. First, elites invest their surpluses in replicating their advantages. … The second response to having such vast wealth is to create other kinds of scarcity [especially of nonmaterial goods like Ivy League acceptances]. … The third challenge is the hardest to fix. … Kids must study harder and for longer than their parents to find jobs that do not often repay the effort. Edward Luce, Financial Times, February 8, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality America's wealth inequality is even greater than that of income — the top 1 percent has more than 40 percent of US wealth, almost twice the share of income. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The average full-time Amazon employee made $37,930 in 2020. In order to accumulate as much money as Bezos ($172 billion) … an employee would have had to start working in the Pliocene Epoch (4.5 million years ago, when hominids had just started standing on two feet!). Mona Chalabi, New York Times Magazine, April 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Being rich in today's America means not having to come across anyone who isn't. Exclusive prep schools, elite colleges, private jets, gated communities, tony resorts, symphony halls and opera houses, vacation homes in the Hamptons and other exclusive vacation sites all insulate them from the rabble. Robert Reich, Christian Science Monitor, February 15, 2014 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Between 2013 and 2015, the wealthiest 14 people saw their wealth increase by $157 billion. This is their wealth increase, got it? Not what they are worth. Increase. That $157 billion is more wealth than is owned by the bottom 40 percent of the American people. One family, the Walton family, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent. Bernie Sanders © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi- millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, The Guardian, October 26, 2017 Average billionaire's wealth: $6,000,000,000,000 / 1,542 = $3,891,050,583 Median wealth per U.S. adult in 2016: $44,977 Avg. billionaire's wealth vs. med. U.S. adult's: $3,891,050,583 / $44,977 = 86,512 times © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality By Molding Tax System, Wealthiest Save Billions ————— Hiring an Army of Lobbyists and Lawyers to Exploit Loopholes and Steer Laws frontpage headline, print edition, New York Times, December 30, 2015 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The central issue is we're developing into a plutocracy. We've got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they're rich because they're smart and constructive. And they don't like government, and they don't like to pay taxes.  Paul Volcker © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the total number of billionaires around the world rose by 412 to a record of 3,228, [Shanghai-based] Hurun [Research Institute] said. China added 259 billionaires last year, more than the rest of the world combined, according to Hurun. Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Economic disparities are also growing by race. In 1963, median family wealth was $43,000 higher for whites than for African Americans. By 2013, it was $123,000 higher (and $120,000 higher than for Hispanics, for whom there isn't data from 1963). Even in the few years since the financial crash, wealth inequality has grown along racial lines. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Economic inequality begets political inequality, which, in turn, makes it harder to address economic inequality. Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists from the University of California at Berkeley, earlier this year estimated that US billionaires had collective wealth of $4.25tn, of which $2.7tn represented untaxed gains. Financial Times, July 24, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Every billionaire is a policy failure. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's slogan, written by Dan Riffle, her policy adviser © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points–exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality A family with a billion-dollar fortune that does absolutely no planning to avoid the 40% tax on large estates and no paid work whatsoever can comfortably take out $15 milliona year to live on (after taxes, adjusted for inflation) in perpetuity until the end of history — while still growing the estate. That's how mind-bogglingly large a billion-dollar fortune is. Salvatore Babones, Sixteen for '16 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Matthew 25:29, a.k.a. the “Matthew Effect” © 2060 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Matthew 13:12 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate. Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he “deserves” it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others. … Good fortune thus wants to be “legitimate fortune.” Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions” © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Forty years ago, wealthy Americans helped finance the U.S. government far more than now through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans help finance the government mainly by lending it money. Robert B.Reich, Beyond Outrage  [2012] © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  From the late 1940s, to the early 1970s, workers and investors did share in the wealth generated by a strong, growing economy. But since then that social compact has frayed: worker productivity has risen by about 70 per cent, but hourly pay has grown by only 12 per cent. Meanwhile, corporate profits have hit record highs. US workers are more educated, more skilled and do more to create corporate profits, but they share far less in the fruits of that labour. Leo Strine, Delaware Supreme Court chief justice, Financial Times, October 1, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  Full floor condominiums priced from $16,000,000 From an advertisement for 111 West 57th Street, New York City, a 1,438-foot-tall residential middle finger © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Given the scale of rising wealth concentrations, opportunity capture and unequal political representation are a serious and worrying trend. For instance: … The bottom half of the world's population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world. “Working for the Few,” Oxfam report, 2014 — the bottom half is nearly 3,500,000,000 people © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Having a wage but no wealth increasingly means settling for a lower standard of living. In recent decades and in rich countries the share of total income accruing to owners of capital (in the form of profits, rent and interest) has risen, while the share paid to labour (in the form of salaries and benefits) has dropped. This means the income of people with lots of capital will diverge from those who have none. Economist, February 16, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  The housing-value gap between households earning more than 200% of their area's median income and other homeowners widened significantly over the decade. In 2010, high-income homeowners held 28% of of all U.S. housing wealth. By 2020, that figure rose to 42.6%. The share of housing wealth held by middle-income households declined to 37.5% in 2020, from 43.8% in 2010. Low-income housing wealth fell to 19.8% in 2020, from 28.2% in 2010. Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality How the Rich Fish — — — — — — — — — — — In their quest for the best fishing, avid anglers are spending $200,000 to $750,000 to create and stock personal streams with computer-controlled conditions headline, Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality I care not how affluent some may be, providing none are miserable in consequence of it. Thomas Paine © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality I don't know why They're so hard on me and you? We don't do nothing in the jook joints Rich folks don't do. But the rich folks have clubs And licenses and such. Only trouble is, we Can't afford that much. “Puzzlement” by Langston Hughes © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality I think not having the estate tax  recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze, or women or movies. Chuck Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowas, explaining why estates worth more than  $5.5/$11 million left by individuals/couples shouldn't be taxed but smaller ones should © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality If we now examine the development of the distribution [of property since the end of the eighteenth century] as a whole, we see that the reduction in inequalities took place mainly to the benefit of what  may be called the patrimonial middle class, that is, the 40 percent between the poorest 50 percent and the richest 10 percent. Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality If you don't ride a Harley, you ain't rich. catchphrase © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality In between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent is a group that has been doing just fine. It has held on to its share of a growing pie decade after decade. And as a group, it owns substantially more wealth than do the other two combined. In the tale of three classes (see Figure 1), it is represented by the gold line floating high and steady while the other two duke it out. You'll find the new aristocracy there. We are the 9.9 percent. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality In the United Kingdom, the United States and around the world, executive compensation has become the locomotive of our contemporary inequality. To “predistribute” wealth more rationally, we would need to slow that engine down. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality In the US, while the average millennial had 30 per cent less wealth than the average boomer by age 35, the richest 10 per cent of the cohort are now about 20 per cent wealthier than their boomer counterparts were at the same age, according to a recent study by researchers in Cambridge, Berlin and Paris. Not all millennials are created equal. John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, April 12, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality It is romantic to build utopias; it is moral to fix what is broken. We don't need billionaires. We need their billions back. For the cities that already exist. For the people in them. For goodness' sake. Jenny Lee, Financial Times, February 27, 2018 on billionaire's penchant for funding such projects as building new cities from scratch, funding the development of floating cities outside tax zones in international waters © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  It's time to reward hard work in America — not just wealth. Joe Biden, 8:39 PM – Dec 3, 2020 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality It was another record year for the wealthiest people in America, as the price of admission to the country's most exclusive club jumped nearly 18%. The minimum net worth to make the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans is now a record $2 billion, up from $1.7 billion a year ago. The group's total net worth climbed to $2.7 trillion, up from $2.4 trillion, and the average net worth rose to $6.7 billion, up from $6 billion. Forbes, “2017 400 Richest Americans” 2017 Average wealth per US adult = $388,585 $2,700,000,000,000 / $388,585 = 6,948,286 2017 Median wealth per US adult = $55,867 $2,700,000,000,000 / $55,867 = 48,329,067 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Just eight of the richest people on earth own as much combined wealth as half the human race. That's a notable change from last year, when it was reckoned to take 62 of the superrich to match the assets of the 3.6 billion people in the poorer half of mankind. New York Times, January 16, 2017 — Wealth of the eight in billions of dollars — Jeff Bezos Bill Gates Mike Bloomberg Amancio Ortega Warren Buffett Carlos Slim Helú Lawrence Ellison Mark Zuckerberg  $45.2 $75.0 $40.0 $67.0 $60.8 $50.0 $43.6 $44.6 — Average wealth in dollars — $426.2 billion / 8 = $53.27 billion $426.2 billion / 3.6 billion = $118.39 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Just 62 people own as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people in the bottom half of world's income scale, the charity Oxfam reported on Moday in it's annual study of inequality, which found that the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen at an alarming rate. As recently as five years ago, the fortunes of 388 billionaires were needed to reach that halfway mark. The study … noted that a global network of tax havens contributed to the divide by allowing the rich to hide trillions of dollars in assets from their countries' governments. New York Times, January 18, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The median U.S. household net worth is $118,200. Bezos has $172,000,000,000. So … how does that compare? Mona Chalabi, New York Times Magazine, April 7, 2022, whose answers are physical comparisons — e.g., if household worth = size of a white blood cell, then Bezos' worth = size of a finback whale [An arithmetic comparison is that Bezos' net worth of $172,000,000,000 = net worth of 1,455,161 median households, which contained 2.64 people in 2022, which means his net worth in 2022 = that of at least 3,841,625 people, which is more people than live in 24 states or  in any city other than New York and Los Angeles] © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Most of the inequality in colonial America was between regions, so when [Peter] Lindert and [Jeffrey] Williamson broke down the data by regions, they found even greater egaitarianism. New England's Gini coefficient was .367, the Middle Atlantic .376, and the free South .341. Those numbers are similar to America in the late 1960s period (the Gini in 1968 was .371). As a comparison, the South, including slaves, had a Gini coefficient of .464, almost identical to 2012 America (.463) after tax and transfer payments. In other words, America today is almost exactly as unequal as the slave-holding South in 1774. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Nobody deserves what the market will bear © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Nobody should be born with a silver spoon in his mouth, or, if he is, it should choke him. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality One hundred and forty-five people became billionaires last year, according to UBS. Data gathered by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index reveal that in 2017 the world's richest 500 people became $1tn richer. That is more than three times the GDP of Denmark. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the three richest men in the US own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the country's population.  Jenny Lee, Financial Times, February 27, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality One of the signers [of an August 2019 Business Roundtable statement proclaiming a “fundamental commitment to all  our stakeholders”] was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO  of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary.  Just weeks after the statement appeared, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce — at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in just two hours. Robert B. Reich, The System © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Perhaps the best evidence of the power of an aristocracy is to be found in the degree of resentment it provokes. By that measure, the 9.9 percent are doing pretty well indeed. The surest sign of an increase in resentment is a rise in political division and instability. We're positively acing that test. You can read all about it in the headlines of the past two years Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Psychologists have found that wealthy people are more likely to lie  and cheat when gambling or negotiating, to cut people off when driving, and to en-  dorse unethical behavior in the workplace. It is not that the rich oppose the existence of rules: rules safeguard their property … But wealthy people's status can lead them to believe their own needs and desires are more important than any rules, so much so that they absolve themselves from complying with the rules altogether. Ngaire Woods, Foreign Affairs, July/Augsut 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The rich should certainly worry about which way the wind is blowing. According to a survey by Pew Research, Americans' views of why people are rich have changed significantly over the past few years. A growing share of respondents said the main reason people were rich was because they had more advantages than others; between 2018 and 2020 the figure rose from 42 to 65 per cent. Rhymer Rigby, FT Wealth, October 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The richest of the ultra rich, the world's bilionaires, now total over 2000. The least of these billionaires now hold 279,000 times more personal wealth than our planet's typical adult. Sam Pizzigati, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The richest 1 per cent of Americans now account for more than half the value of equities owned by US households, according to Goldman Sachs. Since 1990, the wealthiest have bought a net $1.2tn in company stakes, while the rest of the population has sold more than $1tn. … As of September 2019, the bottom 90 per cent owned $4.6tn of equities, or 12 per cent of the total, the analysts noted. Financial Times, February 10, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Right now, the top 10 per cent of households in the US own 87 per cent of equities. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, May 30, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Since the beginning of the pandemic, the total net worth of America's billionaires, all 686 of them, has jumped close to a trillion dollars. In September, nearly 23 million Americans reported going without enough to eat, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Ben Ehrenreich, New York Times Magazine, Novenber 8, 2020 [That's close to $1,457,725,948 per billionaire] [~ $1,000,000,000,000 / 23,000,000 = ~ $43,478 per food insecure person] © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor saying © 2017 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit. Rutger Bregman, at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 2019, on the one measure guaranteed to mitigate wealth inequality © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality These two families' vast wealth (reportedly above $175 billion for the Waltons, and $120 billion for Charles and David Koch in 2018) is as large as the total wealth of a staggeringly large proportion of Americans—as of 2016, the most recent year for which a reliable comparison could be made, the Waltons and the Kochs held as much as the total wealth of the bottom 50 percent. Joseph Stiglitz, People, Power and Profits © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Three decasdes ago … the top percentage point of Americans by wealth only controlled 46 per cent of all US equities held by households. By the end of September 2019, that pro- portion had hit a record 56 per cent, amounting to $21.4tn, according to [Goldman Sach's] calculations. That includes both public stock and ownership stakes in private companies. Financial Times, February 10, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality To those that have it shall be given. That is the doctrine of Mr Trump. It is also the old Republican trickle-down doctrine in purest form. Martin Wolf, Financial Times, May 2, 2017 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality The top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent of American households hold close to the same amount of wealth. That's one of the statistics most frequently cited to describe the problem of economic inequality in the United States today. Here are some others: Nearly two-thirds of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. An estimated 41 percent — 135 million people — are considered either poor or low-income. Eighteen percent of households earn less than $25,000 a year. Even before the pandemic hit, one in four Black families had a net worth of zero. New York Times, July 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality We are the people of good family, good health, good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs. We may want to call ourselves the “5Gs” rather than the 9.9 percent. We are so far from the not-so-good people on all of these dimensions, we are beginning to resemble a new species. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality We have an institutional setup where you accumulate wealth by using public infrastructure, public education, the health system, and then once you have  accumulated the wealth, you push a button and you transfer it somewhere else. Remember the ProPublica study before the summer of 2021 where they looked at billionaires in the U.S.? They pay almost zero federal income tax, as compared with their wealth.  If you pay no tax, it's easier to accumulate more wealth, and that's what continues. Thomas Piketty, New York Times, April 1, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality We need to place as much emphasis on the “predistribution” of wealth as its redistribution. We need ot identify the economic institutions and policies that guide excessive rewards to the rich and powerful — and make them over. Sam Pizzigati,, The Case For a Maximum Wage  © 2018 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Wealth management loans at JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Morgan Stanley have grown 50 per cent in the past four years, compared with only 9 per cent for their overall loan book. … JPMorgan and Citi are now lending more to a small number of ultra-high net worth clients than to their millions of credit card customers. A decade ago, JPMorgan was lending five times as much to credit card customers as it did to private clients. … Controversially, the borrowings can also serve to lower taxes. Instead of selling assets to raise cash — and facing a capital gains tax — high net-worth clients obtain funding by borrowing against the value of their investments. Financial Times, May 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality [W]ealthy Americans wield a lot of influence. By investing money in politics, they can turn economic power into political power. Thus the United States suffers from what can be called “unequal democracy.” Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality When Donald was still in diapers, he and his siblings had a trust fund. His share was about $12,000 a year, which in the late nineteen forties was roughly four times the typical income for a married couple with children if the husband held a full-time job. David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality When economists measure inequality, the most common number they use is called the Gini coefficient, which captures the dispersion of income for households from zero (completely equal) to one (completely unequal). Based on their social tables, [Peter] Lindert and [Jeffrey] Williamson were able to construct a Gini coefficient for early America. In 1774, the Gini coefficient for American households, including slaves, was .441. It was .409 without slaves. To put that into perspective, the Gini coefficient for America in 2012 was .463. What that means is that America in 2012 was actually more unequal than the America of 1774 — even including slavery. Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution © 2021 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality  Where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana © 2019 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality While most American families are treading water, upper-income households now have a median net worth that is nearly 70 times that of the country's lower-income families, a record high, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. Financial Times, April 13, 2015 © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality While offshore assets are rising, there is evidence that the number of clients is falling, and so the average wealth per client seems to be booming. Since the financial crisis, the main Swiss banks have been refocusing their activities on their “key private banking” clients, those with more than $50 million in assets. Gabriel Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality With black individuals deeply underrepresented in Silicon Valley and largely absent at the highest levels of major corporations, little of the wealth created in the stock market or the technology boom has gone to black families. Today, typical black households have just one-tenth the wealth of typical white households, according to Federal Reserve data. New York Times, June 6, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality The world wealthiest subset – the 1426 richest individuals on the planet – are worth $5.4 trillion, which is roughly twice the size of the entire British economy and more than the combined assets of the 250 million least wealthy Americans. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism Average wealth of a 1426er: $5,400,000,000.000 / 1,426 = $3,786,816,269 Average wealth of a 250,000,000er: $5,400,000,000.000 / 250,000,000 = $21,600 $3,786,816,269 / $21,600 = 175,315 Average wealth of a 1426er = combined assets of 175,315 250,000,000ers © 2017 Kwiple.com