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The costs of inequality: When a fair shake isn’t | Harvard Gazette

February 02, 2016

It’s a seemingly nondescript chart, buried in a Harvard Business School (HBS) professor’s academic paper.A rectangle, divided into parts, depicts U.S. wealth for each fifth of the population. But it appears to show only three divisions. The bottom two, representing the accumulated wealth of 124 million people, are so small that they almost don’t even show up.

Collectively, the bottom 40% of the population in the U.S. has negative wealth. Less than zero.