As we know from the Federal Reserve's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, wealth is distributed far more unequally than income, with about 33 percent of aggregate household net worth being held by the top 1 percent of families and with just 2-1/4 percent of wealth being held by the bottom half (Kennickell, 2006).
However, the relative shares of wealth held by the richest and poorest have changed very little over the past decade or so, in contrast to the further widening in the distributions of wages, incomes, and consumption.