The upper decile of the wealth distribution is itself extremely unequal, even more so than the upper decile of the wage distribution. When the upper decile claims about 60 percent of total wealth, as is the case in most European countries today, the share of the upper centile is generally around 25 percent and that of the next 9 percent of the population is about 35 percent. The members of the first group are therefore on average 25 times as rich as the average member of society, while the members of the second group are barely 4 times richer. Concretely, in the example, the average wealth of
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