Wealth inequality is most often visualized as a steep curve with a tiny amount of wealth for poor people on the left and a big pile of wealth for a few rich people on the right.
Generally-speaking, this is a pretty accurate picture of how wealth and power are distributed, but I’ve often wondered how steep the curve really is.
To find out, I scraped some data from the Forbes list of billionaires and squeezed it into the tiny sliver of the population on the right side of the X-axis. Plotting this data on one, meaningful chart proved to be just as futile as the struggle for success in a capitalist society.
You’re welcome to play with the chart or just watch the video below:
This was really interesting… I’ve just finished David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave – a history of prices. In it he charts the growth of inequality and wealth disparity from the 12th century to the 20th. It looks like the curve got steeper then reset itself then get’s steeper again but each time the scale at the rich end gets bigger and bigger. It would be amazing to see this on one of your interactive graphics.