A Doubling of the Rich This Century (And We're Only 17% of the Way In)

I find it helpful to tease through data just to calibrate perception. You may as well, so I'm sharing something I was teasing through this week.

Between 2000 and 2017, the number of Americans reporting income to social security (so this only includes wages), making more than 

• $100k more than tripled (up 236%), going from about 3% of the wage earners to nearly 10%
• $1 million doubled
• $10 million doubled

In 2017, 147,754 wage earners made more than a million. Studies suggest that there is a lot of turnover in this group, though, more people with one-off transactions (selling a business, for instance) than Manny Machado type contracts for that much money steadily paid over years.

What does this mean for a place like San Diego? Assuming San Diego's portion is the same as the average for the country (and I think that given San Diego's median household income is 24% higher than the national average, that's pretty conservative), San Diego city's population would have about

70,000 individuals who make more than $100k,

644 who make more than a million, and

16 who make more than ten million.

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The social security data from which this comes is in current dollars, so does not adjust for inflation. That said, I don't think that people who reach one million in income in 2015 say, "Yeah but that is actually just $997,000 in 2014 dollars."