About this chart

Three series, one chart: the Top 1% (gold), Top 10% (red), and Bottom 50% (blue) shares of total US household wealth. Together they describe how concentrated the wealth distribution has become since the first Gilded Age. The 1896 marker anchors the high-water year of agrarian populism; the 2026 reading is the publication's running test of whether economic populism can end the Second Gilded Age.

Color choice

The gold-red-blue triad on this chart encodes extremes within the wealth distribution, not partisan affiliation. The gold line is the publication's signature color and tracks the Top 1%; the red line marks the broader Top 10% (a different cut, included for context); the blue line is the Bottom 50%, the share that has stayed in the low single digits for most of the era. Lines are explicitly labeled in the legend so the encoding is unambiguous.

Method & sources

Pre-1989 figures are from Saez & Zucman and the World Inequality Database; 1989-present is from the Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts . Reconstruction notes for any divergence between sources are tracked in the per-series methodology page (forthcoming at /methodology/wealth-concentration).