The economically disadvantaged chunk of society has grown as middle wage jobs have disappeared, while their wages have effectively dropped. This is terrible for economic growth IMO.
I'm pretty amateur when it comes to math, but I'm working on it.
They don't take their extra $100K and stick it under a mattress.
Let's say you "invest" in the stock market. Does that actually cause any business to "invest" more? The answer is likely no. It'll drive up the stock prices of the company whose shares you buy, yes, but companies don't tend to make investment decisions based on their share price.
Conversely, companies do make investment decisions based on the demand for their products, so giving money to poor people who immediately spend it is likely to cause more (real world) investment than giving it to rich people who merely "invest" it.
A corporation doesn't need a third factory if no one is buying their products. Because of deflation it may even want to get rid of it's second factory.
“No purchase, only invest!”
At the end of the day the economy only works because it’s extracting profit from consumers, if the profit you’re extracting is money you lent them in the first place...where is the profit coming from? Hence the negative interest rates: you NEED them to take on more debt so they can even buy things from you to begin with. It’s the market itself saying “you need to give them more money”.
Median net worth is $97k, and between 80 and 90 percent of households are above zero: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth-brackets-one-per...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/
>To derive this, I initially take the nominal net worth aggregates for each wealth group that are provided by the Federal Reserve and subtract out consumer durables. Consumer durables are things like cars and fridges that many academics who work on wealth distributions do not consider wealth. The average person in the top 1 percent owns around 32x as many consumer durables (in dollar terms) as the average person in the bottom 50 percent owns. So the subtraction of them reduces the inequality between the top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent.
From there, I adjust the 1989 figures to 2018 dollars using the CPI-U-RS price index. This is what the Federal Reserve also does to adjust wealth figures over time in its Survey of Consumer Finances reports.
What the final product reveals is a 2018 where the top 1 percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets. This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth.
Does the bottom half own less than nothing when summed, or does every person in the bottom half own less than nothing?
IMO "net worth" is kind of fuzzy, e.g. people have organs that could be sold for profit but those aren't included in calculations. I'd rather look at income minus expenses.