Life would look very different for almost everyone if we all shared the wealth.

Writing for the outlet, Andrew Lisa explained that Americans hold a combined $160.35 trillion in wealth. To the average person, that sounds like quite the payday, but someone in the top 1% probably wouldn’t see it that way. According to Lisa, “The bottom 50% of the country shares less than 3% of that enormous pie, while the most fortunate 10% gorge on nearly all of it.”

There are approximately 340.11 million people in the U.S. If they all shared that $160.35 trillion, each person would come away with $471,465. Not only is that more than the average person could even imagine, but it only compounds when you consider how it would add up for families. For example, a couple would hold a combined $942,930, and a family of four would have $1.89 million. Because, of course, in an ideal world, wealth would be distributed evenly regardless of age.

  • gusgalarnyk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    4 days ago

    I’m not saying this would be a bad thing, just that this isn’t “more than most people could imagine” kind of wealth. Maybe more than most people will experience in their lifetimes… but imagine?

    Ask any 10-year-old what they’d do with $1M and somewhere between their personal butler, building a rocket ship and bringing dinosaurs back you will find the limits of human imagination quickly outpace the confines of $1M.

    ^ The person I responded to said “maybe more than most people will experience in their lifetime.” And then referenced $1M. I was simply anchoring to their value colloquially like you would in casual conversation.

    I’m not trying to come off as defensive, I apologize. I responded to a comment that felt like it laser focused on one sentence within the article, only to be responded to by you with again what felt like a laser focused comment about one sentence. You weren’t like “by the way, the median lifetime earnings of an American is badadadada. [Insert your thoughts on my comment], but I just wanted to correct your quoted value.” Which would have made your comment’s point more clear to me, you just dropped a random correction that wasn’t super relevant to the point I was trying to make or even the point of this thread.

    I praised you for correcting that value in the thing you responded to.

    … although to your credit at least this is something worth correcting. It’s good to recalibrate statistics, “US people make more than a million dollars over their lifetime”.

    Again, I apologize for coming off as defensive that was not my intention. I appreciate the calibration of casual figures, that’s good for everyone (and something I particularly appreciate).