::::::::
Information on wealth, unlike income, is notoriously difficult to come by because of the difficulty that governments have in determining all of the different financial assets held by individuals. Several years ago when I tried to find complete wealth distributions, I managed to find only one, and that was of Great Britain’s wealth distribution. It is possible though through much effort to cull the information from varied and disparate sources.
With a model economy however, it’s easy to generate the naturally occurring wealth distribution. One can prove that the computer-generated distribution is correct because it’s the only way to draw a continuous distribution with known wealth data points.
If you ask someone about how they perceive that wealth is distributed among the society, they will usually give the following answer: There are a few poor people, many people in the middle, and a few wealthy people. People think this because it has been drilled into their heads by the media and by public institutions. However, as the graph shows, nothing could be further from the truth.
After viewing the distribution, do you see a Middle Class?
It’s hard to tell by looking at the graph, but the bottom 60% of the population owns only 5% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% owns less than 1% of the wealth. Is this fair?
This model economy shows the result of capitalism where 1000 statistically equal entities were given $10 each initially. To substitute US wealth numbers, put 218 million people on the X axis, and $50 Billion on the Y axis. The shape of the curve will be the same (with very little variation).
The Natural Wealth Distribution (Computer Generated)
