American Wealth, Sliced Up

Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States:

We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices the way wealth is divided among American households:

• 1 person gets 30 slices
• 9 people get 3.7 slices each
• 40 people get 0.75 slices each
• 50 people get 0.05 slices each

Dig in! But watch out for “those people” trying to steal your 0.05.

I checked the math and it’s not quite 100 slices…it’s ~96.¹ I whipped up a pizza pie chart (embedded above) so you can visualize how much each person gets. Is this the kind of party we Americans want to attend on a daily basis?

1. I imagine Thorpe rounded off some numbers for clarity. ↩

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