Wealth In America Research Articles

Health and Wealth in America.

Health and Wealth in America.

The 0.0003 Percent: Short‐Run Dynamics of Extreme Wealth in America

This paper examines short‐run dynamics and changing sources of wealth among the Forbes 400 annual list of wealthiest individuals in the United States, before and after the 2008–2009 financial crisis. We analyze the interaction of growth of wealth with education, age, and being self‐made versus inheriting wealth. We find evidence of conditional convergence of wealth within the group. The wealth of the self‐made grew faster than their counterparts, though less so after the crisis. Those with advanced degrees had higher pre‐crisis growth of wealth than those without such degrees. Controlling for these characteristics, age was not a factor in wealth accumulation. Mobility in and out of the group was higher pre‐crisis.

Book Reviews

Dennis Pearson reviews “The American Covenant: The Untold Story” by Marshall Foster. Rolando Santos reviews “Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America” by Karen Petrou. Michael Cary reviews “Handbook of Cities and Networks” by Celine Rozenblat and Zachary P. Neal.

Top Wealth in America: A Reexamination

Top Wealth in America: A Reexamination

Top Wealth in America: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich

This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States. We assemble new data that links people to their sources of capital income and develop new methods to estimate the degree of return heterogeneity within asset classes. Disaggregated fixed income data reveal that rich individuals earn much more of their interest income in higher-yielding forms, and have much greater exposure to credit risk. Consequently, in recent years, the interest rate on fixed income at the top is approximately three times higher than the average. Using firm-level characteristics to value firms, we find that twenty percent of total pass-through business wealth accrues to those with losses. We combine this new data on fixed income and pass-through business returns with refined estimates of C-corporation equity, housing, and pension wealth to deliver new capitalized wealth estimates. Our approach---which builds on Saez and Zucman (2016) and Bricker, Henriques, and Hansen (2018)---reduces bias because wealth and rates of return are correlated. From 1989 to 2016, the top 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01% wealth shares increased by 7.6, 5.1, and 3.0 percentage points, respectively, to 31.5%, 15.0%, and 7.0%. While these changes are less dramatic than some prior estimates, wealth is very concentrated: the top 1% holds nearly as much wealth as either the bottom 90% or the P90-99 class. We discuss implications for income inequality measures, capital tax policy, and savings behavior. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Top Wealth in America: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich

This paper uses administrative tax data to estimate top wealth in the United States. We assemble new data that links people to their sources of capital income and develop new methods to estimate the degree of return heterogeneity within asset classes. Disaggregated fixed income data reveal that rich individuals earn much more of their interest income in higher-yielding forms, and have much greater exposure to credit risk. Consequently, in recent years, the interest rate on fixed income at the top is approximately three times higher than the average. Using firm-level characteristics to value firms, we find that twenty percent of total pass-through business wealth accrues to those with losses. We combine this new data on fixed income and pass-through business returns with refined estimates of C-corporation equity, housing, and pension wealth to deliver new capitalized wealth estimates. Our approach---which builds on Saez and Zucman (2016) and Bricker, Henriques, and Hansen (2018)---reduces bias because wealth and rates of return are correlated. From 1989 to 2016, the top 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01% wealth shares increased by 7.6, 5.1, and 3.0 percentage points, respectively, to 31.5%, 15.0%, and 7.0%. While these changes are less dramatic than some prior estimates, wealth is very concentrated: the top 1% holds nearly as much wealth as either the bottom 90% or the P90-99 class. We discuss implications for income inequality measures, capital tax policy, and savings behavior.

The Distribution of Wealth in America Since 2016

The Distribution of Wealth in America Since 2016

The 0.0003 Percent: Short-Run Dynamics of Extreme Wealth in America

This paper analyzes the short-run dynamics and changing sources of wealth among the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest individuals in the United States, using annual data for 12 years spanning before and after the financial crisis of 2008-9. Over the entire time period the growth of wealth was negatively related to the previous years’ wealth, implying a slight degree of wealth convergence within the group. We find that the overall growth of the group’s wealth slowed after the crisis but stayed well above the GDP growth rate. Considering the interaction of growth of wealth with personal characteristics, we find that those who can be classified as self-made had a higher average wealth growth rate than their counterparts, although this lead narrowed after the financial crisis, during the Great Recession. Similarly, those with advanced degrees also had higher average growth of wealth in the pre-crisis period. We also examine the mobility of in and out of the Forbes 400, and find that turnover was higher in the period prior to the financial crisis, particularly for self-made individuals and those with advanced degrees. The self-made were also more likely to rise in rank within the Forbes 400 conditional on persisting in the list. By employing an innovative method of dealing with selection bias in a truncated panel, we are able to ascertain that our results are not driven by these biases. We also find some differences in these patterns at the sectoral level, compared to the aggregate group.

They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen

Reviewed by: They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic by Kenneth Cohen James C. Nicholson (bio) They Will Have Their Game: Sporting Culture and the Making of the Early American Republic. By Kenneth Cohen. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pp. xi, 320. $55.00 cloth; $26.99 ebook) Like much of American culture, sports have often become overtly politicized terrain in recent years. But as Curator of Early American Culture at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Kenneth Cohen, shows, the American sporting realm was a site of cultural, social, and political tension long before the National Football League, or even the national anthem, existed. Interspersing the experiences of individual sportsmen into his examination of early American sporting venues (broadly defined to include taverns, billiard rooms, theatres, and racetracks), Cohen argues that these sites provided opportunities "for contesting and limiting elites' social authority while ultimately supporting their economic and political power" (p. 244). Building on and complicating the work of a generation of historians of early American sports culture, Cohen utilizes an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, including newspapers, letters, and other archival material, in support of his facially paradoxical assertion that sporting culture "simultaneously promoted egalitarianism and hierarchy on the Anglo-American mainland between 1750 and 1860" in sporting venues where "white men's shared right to access and engage made elites seem more like other white men, and thus made differences in wealth and power seem less unnatural and more reflective of superior ability and character" (pp. 3, 10). In the decades before the American Revolution, wealthy colonists invested in sporting venues in part to "forge a more distinctive, exclusive, unified, and powerful colonial elite" (p. 23). These venues [End Page 591] gave prominent colonists an opportunity to strengthen business relationships, flaunt their status, and consolidate political power. However, as tensions with Great Britain heightened in the 1770s, American colonies began banning horse racing, cock fighting, and plays in an attempt to foster cultural solidarity and to "scale back a politicized sporting culture that, by 1774, had gotten away from the gentlemen in Congress and jeopardized their leadership of the patriot movement" (p. 87). In the aftermath of revolution, many Americans bristled against any whiff of aristocracy, including genteel sporting culture. However, investors in new sporting venues promoted their capacity to benefit all of society even as they pursued a broader goal of "the construction of economic and political systems that espoused competitive opportunism while rooting power among the few men with the assets and connections to control capital flows" (p. 127). In the Antebellum era, the sporting realm engendered what Cohen calls an early form of mass culture, and survived reformers' efforts to eradicate it. As wealth became more concentrated in the United States, white men across the class spectrum used sport to assert their masculine status and to challenge stereotypes associated with their social class. The antebellum sports culture that embraced an "implied democratic opportunity and meritocracy" ultimately helped to legitimize the notion that the accumulation and preservation of wealth in America was inherently moral (p. 234). Tracking continuity and change within American sporting culture over the course of nearly a century, They Will Have Their Game covers an impressive amount of ground and will be essential reading for scholars of early American society and culture and of American sports history more broadly. [End Page 592] James C. Nicholson james c. nicholson is the author of four books on American sports history, including The Notorious John Morrissey (2016). He taught history at the University of Kentucky. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

Book Review: A Century of Wealth in America by Edward N. Wolff

Book Review: <i>A Century of Wealth in America</i> by Edward N. Wolff

Californians' Beliefs About Income Inequality

Rising income inequality and wealth in America have attracted substantial public attention in recent years. As evidence has mounted that the gap betwen the affluent and the poor has been increasing, elected officials, scholars, journalists, and even figures from popular culture have discussed the causes and effects of this phenomenon. The focus of the debate has often been the economic trends rather than the views of a broad sampling of Americans. But public opinion can condition policy responses, and it is important to measure public opinion on economic inequality, its causes, and potential remedies. This IGS Research Brief seeks to understand public opinion in California about this issue. It describes and analyzes the results of an IGS Poll on income inequality, its perceived causes, and the views of Californians regarding possible responses.

Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980 edited by Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan (review)

Reviewed by: Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980 edited by Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan Glenn Feldman (bio) Seeking a New Majority: The Republican Party and American Politics, 1960-1980. Edited by Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. Pp. 238. $39.95 cloth) In this interesting book, editors Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan advance a straightforward thesis. They focus on the revival of the [End Page 637] Republican Party, not the rise of American conservatism, which they say already enjoys an “unusually rich and creative historiography” (p. 1). Second, they want readers to understand that there was nothing inevitable or even linear about the progression of the GOP after 1960—nor did the evident victory of Republicanism at a national level in 1980 approach the completeness of the previously dominant New Deal consensus. Republican ascendancy would come only more completely, if in waves, after the 1980 Reagan victory—which they portray as a narrow repudiation of Jimmy Carter rather than “a mandate either for conservatism or the GOP” (p. 4). There are some problems with the book, most of which stem from the introduction and its desire to cram every essay into a suitcase of its own making—even though the chapters derive from a set of diverse papers given at a conference in Britain. In particular, the introduction harbors a certain right-leaning celebratory tone and an overstated quality to its arguments about uncertainty that belies a more weighted agenda-driven approach. Among the most balanced and effective chapters are the two on race by Timothy Thurber and Catherine Rymph, and also those on the South and religion by Sean Cunningham and Robert Freedman, respectively. The epilogue is eminently more sensible than the introduction and seems to have been written by a different person entirely. For example, Keynesianism—despite the decade that preceded the Great Recession of 2008 and its tepid recovery—is dismissed in the introduction as a set of “old economic orthodoxies [that] were [obviously] in decay” (p. 2). Anticommunist “containment” is cast as part of a liberal consensus instead of a middle ground between two positions that are not mentioned: rightwing “rollback” and leftist “appeasement.” The “painful and divisive choices of redistributive politics” (p. 4) are discussed as something inherently liberal even though this book was put together during the greatest period of upward redistribution of wealth in America since the 1880s. Even the Republican choice in 1960 is put in decidedly weighted terms: to “hold fast to its conservative tradition or be in essence the ‘me-too’ [End Page 638] party of statist accommodation” (p. 3). Even given the 1920s, it might readily be asked if Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, La Follette, Eisenhower, Nixon, and even Dewey and Wilkie were ever part of such a rigid anti-statist tradition? The low point comes in the contention that “the rise of the Republican Party also brought the GOP Right from the periphery to the center of American politics” (p. 10)—as fundamentally unsound an interpretation of the era as is possible to enunciate. The contention could not be less descriptive of what really happened: the hijacking of the GOP by an extreme, radical-rightist fringe that is never recognized as extreme in this book, and the subsequent move of the Democratic Party to the right. Instead, the collection lauds the efforts of modern GOP architects—Kevin Phillips, Art Laffer, Jude Wanniski, Paul Craig Roberts, et al.—without ever mentioning that they are all now voting for Democrats or have spectacularly repudiated what they consider to be an extreme rightist GOP. This misguided path is followed most closely by contributor Donald Critchlow who, while denying that his chapter is a cautionary tale or a “celebration of light over darkness” (it is clearly the latter), describes Ayn Rand as a “giant” on par with F. A. Hayek even as he acknowledges that Rand thought Hayek “dangerous” for his partial acceptance of a role for the state (pp. 22-23, 27). Critchlow also bows at the altar of nuance carried to relativism by rendering now-ritual homage to the “Suburban School” of Matthew Lassiter, Joseph Crespino, Byron Shafer, and Richard...

Experts Among Us

DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2012.47.0641 “It comes down to expert opinion,” she said, “and I am an expert.” Those startling words came from a junior faculty member during one of our fellowship orientation talks. I looked around the room at my classmates to see if anyone else shared my surprise at her statement, but no one seemed to flinch. Admittedly, this claim came 50 or 60 slides into her presentation, and most of the audience appeared dazed. A number of smartphones were out, and people’s fingertips were busy navigating the Internet and social media outlets, their minds likely distracted by thoughts of waiting tasks or evening plans. If the others had heard what she had just said, they had either accepted it as genuine expert opinion or had simply not registered it. But the more I considered her statement, the more unsettled I felt. Calling oneself an expert, especially as a new faculty member just out of fellowship training, smacks of arrogance. Aren’t experts supposed to have at least a few gray hairs? Don’t experts have long lists of publications? Aren’t their names the ones found inside the covers of the big journals? Aren’t they people like Dr Einhorn or Dr Kantarjian—physicians whose work has defined their field, whom few fellows have met but all of us admire? Real experts in clinical oncology are the people who write the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, speak at national conferences, and are the principal investigators in major studies. To most of us trainees, such physicians seem at times more like celebrities than real people. They are the real experts. This past election year, we were reminded about the distribution of wealth in the United States and the affluent group referred to as the top 1%. This top 1% controls 40% to 50% of the wealth in America. In the field of clinical oncology, I would offer there is also an elite academic equivalent to the US economic top 1%, socially if not numerically: a small cadre of physicians so rich in their knowledge, intuition, and fame that they command a similar disproportionately large stake in our field. Like the wealthy, they have their own exclusive social circles (referred to as politics by those of us on the outside). They publish in high-impact journals often overseen by their friends and work to validate or disprove one another’s results. These influential experts define the standards of clinical care that many of us follow in our daily practice, hoping to provide similarly expert-like care to our patients. Just as society is said to consist of the haves and have nots, our profession can be divided into those writing guidelines and those reading guidelines. Like the diseases we treat, the remaining 99% make up a heterogeneous group. The rank-and-file 99% include physicians with a wide spectrum of talents and interests, such as those with busy private practices, physician-scientists with limited clinical interest or responsibilities (some of whom may be experts in nonclinical areas), junior faculty members, and less-influential midcareer and tenured professors. Although many of these physicians do not aspire to become part of the 1%, some are turned off by the personal sacrifices required or the constant battles; others work diligently in hopes of someday breaking into the upper echelon of our profession. Like members of the top 1%, physicians in the 99% may have an interest or area of expertise that has led to an excellent reputation at the institutional or even regional level. Most in the 99% are familiar with published treatment guidelines, provide excellent care to their patients, and enjoy referrals from their counterparts in the community. Where they fall short, however, is in the national and international recognition and influence associated with those in the top 1%. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, journalist Malcolm Gladwell discusses three key components of high-level success in any field: talent, opportunity, and initiative. Talent, in our profession, most closely equates with intelligence (which has many dimensions), whereas initiative can be likened to motivation or diligence. Gladwell discusses the 10,000 Hour Rule, a concept based on a study by psychologist Anders Ericsson, as an example of the importance of initiative and persistence. To illustrate this, he describes the Beatles, a wellknown musical group from the 1960s. During a 7-year period before their entry into American culture, the Beatles played shows lasting several hours on a near-daily basis. Their biographer, Philip Norman, proclaimed that after this period, “they JOURNAL OF CLINICAL ONCOLOGY A R T O F O N C O L O G Y VOLUME 31 NUMBER 7 MARCH 1 2013

Solve It! A Trillion Dollar Classroom

According to a September 2006 report by Forbes magazine, the combined wealth of America's 400 richest people is $1.25 trillion. According to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a dollar bill is 2.61 inches wide and 6.14 inches long. It is also 0.0043 inches thick.

Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality. By Lisa A. Keister. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 307p. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Lisa Keister's work offers students of research methods, and of public policy, an ideal model. It also offers, albeit indirectly, a study that should inform policy makers as they discuss proposals to alter inheritance and estate tax policies and privatize Social Security. Wealth in America explores the distribution of household resources from 1962 through 1995. Questions regarding the distribution of wealth in the United States are seldom addressed directly because readily available data do not permit a straightforward approach. Because it is easier to deal with questions related to the distribution of income than with the distribution of wealth, research generally focuses on income distribution and we assume that there is a relatively straightforward relationship between the two. Keister tackles the data problems associated with measuring household assets allowing her to evaluate the distribution of wealth. Since measuring assets at any point in time is a challenge, it is all the more remarkable that she is able to examine changes in the distribution of household assets over time.

Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality. By Lisa A. Keister. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 368 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95

Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality. By Lisa A. Keister. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 368 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95

Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality

Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality

Wealth in America. By Lisa Keister. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x, 307. $59.59, cloth; $19.95, paper.

The first of the two books, Wealth in America, fills an important gap in the recent literature on inequality in America. The most recent comprehensive treatment of wealth inequality in the United States is, perhaps, Robert Lampman's book, The Share of Top Wealth-Holders in National Wealth, 1922–56, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). However, its coverage of wealth inequality ends in 1956.

Wealth in America: trends in wealth inequality

Wealth in America: trends in wealth inequality

Book Review: Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red. Race, Wealth, and Social Policy inAmerica. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 209 pages

Book Review: Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red. Race, Wealth, and Social Policy inAmerica. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. 209 pages