In 2022, the difference in total holdings between an American in the 50th percentile of household wealth and an American in the 51st percentile was $9,130, or 4% of total holdings and roughly the cost of a used Hyundai Sonata. At the same time, the difference between the household wealth of an American in the 90th percentile and an American in the 91st percentile was $225,150, or 10% of total holdings and roughly the cost of a vintage Aston Martin. The difference between the household wealth of an American in the 95th percentile and an American in the 96th percentile was $450,000, or 12% of total holdings and roughly the cost of a house with a used Hyundai Sonata out front. 

Differences in wealth may be most extreme at the tippy top – where they are best measured in a yacht length at the waterline – but inequality is most keenly felt among the merely well-to-do. This why the children of upper-middle class providers – the folks with household incomes north of $150,000 and south of “fuck you money” – don’t sleep well at night. This is why America is full of poor little rich kids. 

The poor little rich kid is both a staple of popular culture – Emma Watson in Bling Ring, Winona Ryder in the 1980s, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn – but also a very real social phenomena. In 2025, Harvard Researcher Emily Dore demonstrated that childhood exposure to income inequality had a more profound negative effect on the long-term health of children from more privileged backgrounds than it did on children from less privileged backgrounds. Her data suggested that well-off children from high-income areas had worse expected health outcomes than less well-off children from middle-class towns. Dore had an explanation too: anxiety. 

There’s a reason that Millennial AP students spent the early 2000s cranking David Usher’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car (“Any place is better/Starting from zero, got nothing to lose”) in the Passats they’d received as 16th birthday presents. The song wasn’t new and they weren’t sympathetic; they were jealous. The animating idea of America is that each generation will do better than the last. Most feared they wouldn’t. Plenty feared they’d do worse than their friends, specifically the ones driving faster cars.

If hope is the thing with wings, class is the thing with a klonopin prescription.

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