Yes, America Is an Oligarchy

Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin has recently been fretting about the increasing use of the term “oligarchy” by her fellow Democrats. Slotkin apparently feels that “oligarchy” has no resonance beyond America’s coasts. 

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been drawing record crowds beyond those coasts to his anti-oligarchy rallies. Americans, Sanders has said, don’t appear to be “quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.”

Has America become an oligarchy? Could denouncing America’s growing oligarchy be a winning political message? Let’s leave those two senators to continue their debate over whether the term “oligarchy” resonates with voters and consider instead whether that term should resonate with them.

Indeed, the data on America’s wealth concentration over the past four decades point us clearly in only one direction: oligarchy. 

But that direction can be difficult to scope out — until we look beyond the increasing share of the country’s wealth held by each top-most group, whether that share be the top one percent or top 0.1 percent of whatever. The statistics on the wealth of America’s rich consistently obscure the wealth of America’s richest. Say, for instance, that the top 0.01 percent grabs an additional two percent of the country’s wealth. The entire top 0.1 percent and entire top one percent would show that same two percent increase even if the wealth share of the bottom 0.99 percent of the top one percent has registered no increase at all. 

We can only see the pattern of American wealth concentration clearly when we focus on the groups that follow each of those top-most groups, the nine percent that follow the top one percent, the 0.9 percent that follow the top 0.1 percent, and the 0.09 percent that follow the top 0.01 percent. The numbers we get from these breakdowns point us dramatically to the handful of very wealthy Americans who make up our 21st-century American oligarchy. 

The bottom line: Since 2012, the concentration in our country’s wealth has almost entirely been limited to just our richest 0.01 percent. Our country’s wealth is not just continuing to concentrate. The beneficiaries of that concentration have become an ever smaller group. 

How small? The economist Gabriel Zucman has recently shared with The Wall Street Journal  estimates on the share of U.S. wealth held by our richest 0.00001 percent, an elite just 19 households strong. The wealth share of this tiny group has hit 1.8 percent of total U.S. wealth, a share that represents over a ten-fold increase from the top 0.00001 percent’s share in 1982.

To recap, the concentration of American wealth has been, over the past dozen or so years, largely limited to the top 0.01 percent of American households, and half that concentration has benefited just 19 households.