Data on the three financial situations reveal divergent growth patterns: while average earnings increased by 36% and income by 46% over the past three decades, wealth grew by 143%. This substantial difference suggests that wealth accumulation has been driven more by asset price appreciation than by savings from income. As shown in Figure 1, the wealth-to-income ratio based on SCF data almost doubled from about 4 in 1989 to over 7 in 2022. A similar but less pronounced trend appears when using Financial Accounts and National Income data. In contrast, the capital-to-output ratio from the Penn World Table remains relatively constant over this period. This striking difference highlights that asset price appreciation – not accumulation of physical capital – has been the primary driver of wealth growth.

While the SCF excludes the Forbes 400 (the wealthiest 400 Americans), incorporating their wealth from Forbes Magazine estimates reveals interesting patterns. A recent decline represents a potential inflection point in the long-term trend of rising wealth concentration. As shown in Table 3, their share of total household wealth increased from 1.8% in 1989 to a peak of 3.0% in 2019 before slightly declining to 2.8% in 2022. The top 1% wealth share (including the Forbes 400) followed a similar pattern rising from 31.2% in 1989 to 40.2% in 2016, before falling to 26.9% in 2022.