Dalio – Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue The Two Economies: The Top 40% and the Bottom 60%

Via Ray Dalio's Linkedin

[dalio]

To understand what’s going on in “the economy,” it is a serious mistake to look at average statistics. This is because the wealth and income skews are so great that average statistics no longer reflect the conditions of the average man. For example, as shown in the chart below, the wealth of the top one-tenth of 1% of the population is about equal to that of the bottom 90% of the population, which is the same sort of wealth gap that existed during the 1935-40 period.

To give you a sense of what the picture below the averages looks like, we broke the economy into two economies—that of the top 40% and that of...