Ordinarily I find breaking income inequality down into the top 1%, or the top 10%, or whatnot, a little frivolous—using dramatic or round numbers always makes a policy argument sound sloppy or arbitrary, as if we're not really serious about this stuff, but just pitching what sells.
But now comes evidence that the precipitous drop in net worth of American families reported last week continued right up to the 89.9th percentile and then abruptly stopped. Via Slate:
Middle-income families tend to have wealth concentrated in their homes and a low savings rate, making them economically vulnerable. And it wasn’t just in the middle quintile of income that families saw a big decline in their median net worth. Right up to the 89.9th percentile, family wealth suffered badly in the three years to 2010.
Meanwhile, the median net worth of families in the top 10 percent of income actually went up.
There's a whole lot of other info in that article to make you want to go Occupy a Cosi, but none as existentially weird as the fact that reality now seems to be following statistics and not the other way around.
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