Interesting, considering that this report is coming from a sociologist rather than from an economist. Specifically from
William Domhoff, who has made his living for the last 50 years writing books advocating class warfare. Admittedly the data which Domhoff cites comes from Edward Wolff, who is an economist, but he's got a similar axe to grind. Wolff is also one of the "anointed ones" who
contribute to
George Soro's Project Syndicate -- which calls into question the objectiveness of the whole project.
The other key reference is Arthur Kennickell from the Federal Reserve, who seems to have made a career out of tracking wealth distribution.
But so what? -- I don't care how many people you line up with $0 of savings or income, they are not going to control the economy -- and why should they? Or rather, if "the early bird gets the worm" -- why should it be taken away from him?
These sorts of stories also never take into account the transitional nature of wealth. The assumption is that it can somehow be handed down from generation to generation. Taking a look at the super-rich of the past, and you'll discover that in only a couple of generations the wealth has often been divided across many descendants, and squandered by many. So how many of today's "wealthy" came from the wealthy of the 1950's or the first decade of the 20th century??? How many have become wealthy in the last 40 years? If it's a different cadre of people every generation, than the premise of the whole piece (the concentration of wealth) is hosed because there is a revolving door to the wealthy class -- as there should be. The report also cites the "richest families" -- how is that defined? In all of my searching on the web, I couldn't find any description of how the raw data was collected. The fact that the data is not publicly available calls it into question.
The other piece to consider is the mathematics of the situation. Specifically -- The Pareto principle -- which was named after
Vilfredo Pareto and built on observations of his such as that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. The reality is that this distribution is true of just about anything, and is routinely used in the business and Quality Assurance realms for focusing on "the vital few" as opposed to the "trivial man". The only time that there won't be something similar to a Pareto distribution is when there is a perfectly even distribution, or a very low correlation to a given input variable -- say effort or intelligence. To put this into economic terms, the only way to not have wealth concentrated is through communism (which history has demonstrated means that nobody has much of anything), or else to make the benefits of hard work, thrift and craft to be negligible, in which case most people won't put in the effort to excel because it's not worth the meager benefits. Both of these concepts are anathema to the free enterprise concepts which the United States was founded on, and would be the death of any economy since there would be no growth.