> The top 0.0001% gained their wealth not by inheriting it
How did you come to that conclusion? I looked for that in the figures, but I couldn’t find what percentage came into money from an inheritance. Perhaps it’s placed in the 12% ‘Diversified/Other’ category, but the impression I got from the article was that they tallied how the money was earned in the first place, not where the ones holding the purse got it from.
I believe your interpretation of the article in this aspect is incorrect. For instance, 4 of the top 10 spots are taken up by members of the Walton family. Those people inherited their wealth from Bud and Sam Walton, the founders of Wal*Mart.
> Kaplan and Rauh find that America’s wealthiest are no longer a collection of Rockefellers and Carnegies. During the period the researchers investigated, the number of individuals on the Forbes 400 who were the first in their family to run a business rose from 40% to 69%. Sixty percent of individuals on the list grew up wealthy in 1982 while only 32% did in 2011.
> Although being born into wealth is less and less necessary for admission to the club of America’s wealthiest individuals, ...
Do some math. According to Wikipedia the population of the USA is 316,856,000. The 0.0001% of the population is 31685 after removing partial human beings caused by mathematical division. If the Forbes 400 list is used as a sample space for the rest of the 0.0001% then the numbers seem plausible. Note that I'm just playing "mathematician" and I haven't analyzed the 400 people in the list or did anything deeply scientific.
How did you come to that conclusion? I looked for that in the figures, but I couldn’t find what percentage came into money from an inheritance. Perhaps it’s placed in the 12% ‘Diversified/Other’ category, but the impression I got from the article was that they tallied how the money was earned in the first place, not where the ones holding the purse got it from.
I believe your interpretation of the article in this aspect is incorrect. For instance, 4 of the top 10 spots are taken up by members of the Walton family. Those people inherited their wealth from Bud and Sam Walton, the founders of Wal*Mart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_family