The past year, everyone has been talking about the rise of inequality in the world, and in the United States, over the past few decades. In 2015, the richest .01 percent of Americans own over 11 percent of the country’s wealth.
But another .01 percent has been in the news today, although I haven’t seen the number put in such terms, as guns (~33,000) are likely to have recently surpassed automobiles (~32,000) in number of Americans killed per year. 33,000 is, of course, slightly more than .01 percent of 320,000,000, the population of the United States.
It’s obviously not a coincidence of any statistical significance, but it’s still interesting to note that America is either violent enough or unequal enough (or both) that the same number of people are shot to death yearly as own more than a tenth of the country’s wealth.
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