alt Hacker NewsEvery discussion about the 'top 10%' seems to make the underlying assumption that the set of people who fall under that category are consistent. While there are certainly individuals who enter the top 10% (or top 1%) and stay there; there are large numbers of people who move in and out of those categories.
For me personally, I am in the top 10%; but a few decades ago, I was not.
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This is bourgeois idealism. In reality, the people in the top 10% remain there and rarely fall
This is a good point I haven't considered in the past and worth to take into the overall discussion.
Here's what I found asking AI:
US Household Wealth Distribution (Q1 2026, Fed DFA)
Group | Share of US Total Net Worth
------------|-------------------------
Top 0.1% | 14.4%
Top 1% | 31.6%
Top 10% | 67.9%
|
Bottom 90% | 32.1%
Bottom 50% | 2.5%
The top 1% alone holds more than the entire bottom 90% minus the upper-middle segment.
To be in the top 10% you would need roughly 1,8 Million $ in assets (that's probably 90% of HN useerbase)
Basically, the bottom 50% are a slave class that doesn't even participate in the economy.
LE: The richest 20% are the only ones powering the U.S. economy, per Moody's Zandi. K-shaped economy all the way.
The statistical evidence for your claim is not good. There is certainly a generational effect in that 5 year olds are typically not in the upper decile, simply because they generally have little to no individual wealth or income. But in the USA at least, most people die in the same decile they were born into.