A People’s Portfolio of the United States
This chapter focuses on how finance has transformed household wealth—a trend with long-term implications for how social-class inequality becomes entrenched. It first reviews the uneven distribution of wealth in the United States. Wealth inequality has risen since the last quarter of the 20th century. Today, fewer American families have sufficient means to accumulate wealth over time, and the concentration of capital in the hands of a select few has widened the fault line between the richest and the rest. The chapter also examines how the distribution of wealth has changed across generations—more precisely, what social scientists call “cohorts.” That is, wealth for the baby boomer generation differs greatly from wealth among the millennials. Since wealth accumulation develops over the course of a person’s life, families in young adulthood and near retirement are considered.