Financial inequality is rising in the United States, but most of the rise is at the top of the distribution. It is not a ‘rich-poor’ gap opening up, but a ‘rich-everyone else’ gap. The top are pulling away from the rest, and the very top are pulling away even faster. A while back, Scott Winship used Dubai's Burj Khalifa as an illustration for top-driven income inequality, showing by comparison to Mark Zuckerberg even Mitt Romney might start to feel hard-up.
So, is there a better way to measure wealth? Probably not. But there are different ways, namely surveys and estate tax multipliers. Each has their advantages and disadvantages. The Survey of Consumer Finances, the key source of self-reported wealth data, misses a lot of people: the response rate among high-wealth individuals is only around 25%. The estate tax multiplier method treats people dying in a given year as a representative sample of the population, and uses the estate taxes due on their death to estimate the distribution of wealth. But this approach relies heavily on estimated mortality rates: and it looks as if the mortality rates of wealthy individuals are dropping relative to the general population.
The truth here is quite hard to come by. In part, this is because the nature of wealth and the nature of the wealthy are changing. More wealth now comes from labor income, or at least is ‘self-made’ rather than coming from inheritance. As Kopczuk writes, “Individuals who are wealthy nowadays are less likely to come from wealth than in the past and more likely to have reached the top through earnings or entrepreneurial success.” If wealth is newer, and held by younger people, it will be harder to find and measure. This may be good news from a meritocratic standpoint, but bad news in terms of empirical estimates of wealth.
While the current generation of wealthy are more likely to be self-made than heirs, this may not be true for the generation to follow. As the baby boomers – including the really wealthy ones - start to die off, the patterns of wealth inequality that have emerged in their generation may strongly influence economic inequality and opportunity in the next. Tax policy could help to disrupt these inherited inequalities, but given the response to President Obama’s budget, I wouldn’t hold your breath.