Recently a fellow asked me about my impressions of French economist Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in theTwenty-first Century. I have not read the book, but I’ve read comments about it including a recent interview with the author. Hepostulates the existence and forecasts the growth of inequalityin terms ofthe concentration of wealth and income.
In the introduction to the interview, there was an interesting statement: “hard work will matter less, inherited wealth more.” Really?Added up the entire annual realized incomeof those householdsin the $10M and over category the total would be over $300 billion.What percent of thisamount is derived from trusts and estates? The answer is 1.3%. This percentage even doubled or tripled would hardly qualify America as a country where inherited wealth “mattered more.”
It appears from the interview that bothMr. Pikettyand the interviewer are using income and wealth as synonymous terms. They are not. In my thirty-plus years of surveying and studying millionaires, I have consistently found that 80 to 86% are self-made. That also applies to decamillionaires. In 1982 according to Forbes about 38% of America’s wealthiest people were self-made. In 2012, the percentage jumped to 70%.
In a recent blog, I cite what many consider to be the most exhaustive study of socioeconomic mobility in America. Professors Chetty of Harvard and Saez of Cal-Berkeley studied about 50 million federal income tax returns of parents and their adult children. Part of this study as mentioned in The Wall Street Journal stated that:
The odds of a child moving up the economic ladder have remained the same for about the past three decades . . . that contradicts the narrative in Washington that economic mobility has declined in recent years.
Economic opportunities abound in this country. Yet most Americans are not wealthy. It is easy to blame the so-called inequities inour economy. But itis more about the fact thatAmericans spend all ormostof their income on things that have little or no lasting value!They lack the discipline required to accumulate wealth.Most households areon a treadmill of working and consuming.The typical American household has a median annual realized income within the $50,000 to under $75,000 bracket. Only 6.3% of these peoplehave any realized capital gains income. Thus an update is in order. Remember what I wrote in The Millionaire Next Door: big hat, no cattle. And now the update:no capital, no capital gains.
