Bernie Sanders has been out on the campaign trail pounding the drum about income inequality. According to Bernie, there’s a finite number of wealthy people in this country consuming a greater and greater number of resources, while the rest of us- commonly referred to as the 99 percent- fight over an increasingly sparse selection of table scraps.
Bernie’s narrative is meant to push the trope that the American class system is stratified and ascendance is a myth, but this is rubbish. As Forbes noted in 2014:
Since the launch of The Forbes 400, first published in 1982, we’ve been keeping a close tab on the wealthiest people in the U.S. And while we can tell a whole lot about how their fortunes have evolved, this year, for the first time, we decided to delve deeper into one defining characteristic of these billionaires: How far did they climb to make their way to the top?
This year, we gave each member of The Forbes 400 a score on a scale from 1 to 10 — a 1 indicating the fortune was completely inherited, while a 10 was for a Horatio Alger-esque journey. We also did the analysis for every 10 years going back to 1984. Looking at the numbers over time, the data lead us to an interesting insight: in 1984, less than half of people on The Forbes 400 were self-made; today, 69% of the 400 created their own fortunes.
So economic stratification is a myth, has been a myth, and is increasingly evaporating. It might make Bernie and his friends mad as hell that there’s no magic path to the big time for lifelong baristas and Women’s Studies Ph.D.s. You don’t have to be a billionaire to be happy, but if you want to be, the opportunity to innovate and work your way to financial success is as great as it ever was.
AAN Staff
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