Online Dating and Inequality

Wealth inequality—the difference between how much wealth is owned by the most-wealthy, versus how much wealth is owned by everyone else—is higher in the US than in most other industrialized countries, and that gap between haves and have-nots has increased fairly dramatically over the past 60 years or so.

The gap closed a little beginning in 2020, due largely to pandemic-era government policies that strengthened social safety nets and provided resources for people who might have otherwise lost everything when the economy was disrupted by shut-downs (this included stimulus checks), but the overwhelming trend is still a pooling of resources at the top and a comparable dearth of resources at the bottom.

Based on government data from 2023, families at all economic levels have gained more wealth since the 1960s, but those at the top (in the 90th percentile) have gained far, far more: a more than six-fold increase, from an average of $294,573 to an average of $1.9 million (that’s compared to an increase from -$23 to $450 for those in the 10th percentile, and a near-quadrupling of wealth for those in the 50th percentile, who went from an average of $50,598 to an average of $192,700).