Many people don't like the fact that there's a big gap between rich and poor, but they don't support changing how wealth is distributed. We're studying how regular people talk about wealth and inequality in their everyday conversations. While we know a lot about how rich and powerful people talk about these issues in politics and the media, we don't know much about how everyday people talk about them.

We think that when people talk about wealth, they often repeat the idea that success is based on merit, that being wealthy has to be respected and that inequality is just how things are. 

In WealthTalks, we are looking at how people about wealth and inequality online and offline in five different countries (Botswana, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, and the US). How often people talk about these topics? What do they talk about? In which ways do they talk about it? We will also see how these conversations change depending on who's talking, where they're talking, and what's happening in their country at the time. For example, we want to see if conversations about wealth and inequality are different between countries in the Global South and Global North, and how much race plays a part in these conversations. Finally, we want to see how these conversations affect what people think about inequality and whether they think wealth should be redistributed more evenly.

We are starting by having focus group discussions to get an idea of what these conversations are like. This is just the beginning of our research, and we'll use what we learn from these discussions to guide the rest of our project.

The exact answer depends on the the country under study, what is defined as wealth, and the data that is used. In general, scholarship suggests that wealth inequality has risen in the last decades in most democracies. The increases in wealth are more pronounced than for income.

A study by Schröder and colleagues helps us to understand the specific situation in Germany. They combine difference data sources. They find that the top 10% of the wealthiest individuals have a share of 67% of the German net wealth. The share of the top 1% is 35% and the share of the top 0.1% is 20%. The mean net wealth in Germany is 139.007 EUR, but the median net wealth is much lower with 22.800 EUR. Whereas 25% of the population do not have any wealth, the top 1% owns a median wealth of over one million and the top 0.1% even 5.650.000 EUR.

More information can be found here: Ungleichheit.info, WSI Verteilungsmonitor, Verteilungsfrage.org, Böckler Impuls Series on Inequality. Publications written for a general wider audience include, for example, Butterwegge (2020) or bpb (2023).

According to the Tax Policy Observatory of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), in 2022, the top 1% of Brazil’s population controlled 28% of the nation’s income, while the richest 5% held 40%. This left the remaining 95% of Brazilians with only 60% of the total income. These findings are based on data from the Federal Revenue Service. More details are available at: FGV Tax Policy Observatory.

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Wealth is shared unevenly across the United States population. Since the 1990s, wealth has become more concentrated among the most affluent groups in society. Today, the top 10% richest Americans hold about two thirds of all the country's wealth. The top 1% alone owns over 30% of all wealth. The least affluent half of the population, 168 million people, together owns less than 3% of the wealth. These numbers come from the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Census. Learn more about wealth inequality in the U.S. at https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:139;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares;range:1996.1,2024.2.

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Various non-governmental organizations are active in the field.

In the German speaking countries, these include, for example, Taxmenow, Oxfam Deutschland, or Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit.

Non-profit organizations that have campaigned on the issue of wealth inequality in the US include Oxfam America , Fight Inequality, the Wealth Inequality Initiative, and Inequality.org.

In Brazil, ABCDBR is an organization focused on combating inequalities, including income and wealth disparities, through reports and awareness efforts. For a recent report, see: RELATÓRIO 2024.

The Volkswagen Foundation is one of the largest non-governmental funders of academic research in Germany. It is economically independent of the automotive manufacturer.

The project is funded in an academic funding line. WealthTalks is a basic research project and no applied research. A board of external reviewers voted for the importance of our research questions and the robustness of our methods.

The scholars work for their respective universities and are fully independent. The Foundation has no right to interfere in the collection, analysis or findings of the study.

Please feel free to send us a message at wealthtalks@polsoz.fu-berlin.de.

If you want to report a concern or issue to an independent party, please contact m.kuenzler@fu-berlin.de (Mathias Künzler, Ombudsperson, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany).