Wealth Inequality in America Drawn to Scale

An interactive, wall‑printable graphic maps U.S. household wealth to scale where one pixel equals $5,000, arranging each percentile from poorest to richest so viewers literally scroll past the vast majority to reach the very rich. It combines percentiles 1-99 from the 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances (adjusted to 2026 dollars) with top‑1% averages from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts (Q1 2026), and includes downloadable PDFs, an explanatory video, a companion with full numbers and methods, and sliders to enter a household net worth and see its share of total wealth.

The visualization argues that wealth is extremely concentrated: the median household’s stack of $100 bills is about nine inches tall while the average top‑1% household’s stack is roughly 145 feet, and the top 0.1% (about 136,095 households) towers far above that. The poorest 8% are shown with reported debt (negative net worth). Additional overlays compare perceived and ideal wealth distributions (from Norton & Ariely) to the actual distribution, underscoring the gap between expectations and reality and inviting viewers to print or share the full, exaggeratedly tall graph to make the inequality tangible.