Concretely, if gifts prior to death were not included, we would find that average wealth at death in 2000–2010 was just over 20 percent higher than average wealth of the living. But this is simply a reflection of the fact that the dead have already passed on nearly half of their assets. If we include gifts made prior to death, we find that the (corrected) value of μ is actually greater than 220 percent: the corrected wealth of the dead is nearly twice as great as that of the living. We are once again living in a golden age of gift giving, much more so than in the nineteenth century.
