Has the U.S. Distribution of Wealth Worsened?

Wealth inequality in the United States is obvious to everyone. The Federal Reserve’s triennial Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF) documents the glaring and persistent divide between rich and poor, confirming that ownership of financial and real assets in the United States has been highly concentrated for decades (see our earlier post). The most recent 2016 estimates suggest that the top 10% of the wealth distribution own nearly three-quarters of all marketable assets, with the top 1% owning more than half of that. And, Saez and Zucman (SZ) estimate that the U.S. distribution has been getting worse, with the top 1% share of marketable wealth rising by more than 10 full percentage points since 1989.

But, as Catherine, Miller and Sarin (CMS) recently highlight, adding in the present discounted value of Social Security benefits (net of taxes) to construct a more comprehensive measure of wealth alters these patterns. First, according to CMS’s estimates, the share of marketable wealth in total wealth has plunged by more than 18 percentage points since 1989. Second, over the past three decades, the top 1% share of total wealth has risen only modestly, while the share owned by the top 10% has declined somewhat.

In this post, we highlight the CMS results, and decompose their changes in total wealth shares into two parts: the changes in marketable and Social Security wealth shares accruing to each group, and the aggregate decline over time of marketable wealth as a share of total wealth. We show that the latter dominates the overall trend in this more comprehensive measure of inequality….

On the Distribution of Wealth

In an effort to understand the dynamics of the distribution of consumption, income and wealth, over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research. While important debates about measurement and data interpretation continue, a range of evidence points to two important conclusions. First, over the past two centuries, the global income distribution has become far more equal. But, while the gap between countries is now much smaller, in recent decades, inequality within some advanced countries, especially in the United States, has risen.

Rather than income or consumption, in this post we focus on the distribution of wealth. Wealth affects welfare in at least two key ways. First, in the presence of borrowing constraints, it provides a buffer against fluctuations of income, allowing households to smooth consumption in the face of temporary bouts of illness or unemployment. Second, it provides the basis for household spending in retirement. .

As we will see, the distribution of wealth is far less equal than that of income. Moreover, recent research shows that, following the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, the U.S. wealth distribution has become decidedly more unequal. As a result, a large portion of U.S. households appears to have little scope for meeting retirement needs out of their current net worth, making federal insurance programs key to their future well-being.

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Money, Banking, and Financial Markets