The bottom half of adults own 2% of wealth

The shares come from the World Inequality Report 2022, published by the World Inequality Lab, which estimates how household wealth is distributed across adult populations worldwide. Its headline split: the richest 1% of adults hold about 38% of global household wealth, the next 9% hold another 38%, the middle 40% hold 22%, and the poorest half share the remaining 2%.

The roughly $450 trillion total is a rounded, order-of-magnitude figure for household wealth around 2022, used here to size the grid; the percentage shares, not the dollar total, are the report's own numbers. Read together, they mean the top tenth of adults own more than three times what the other nine-tenths combined do.

Because the grid measures ownership rather than earnings, it answers a different question than an income chart would: not what people make in a year, but what they hold. The report underlines the point with chapters on the rise of multimillionaires and on ways to redistribute wealth, from taxing multinationals to taxing wealthy individuals.

World Inequality Report 2022 (World Inequality Lab): top 1% ≈38% of global wealth; next 9% ≈38%; middle 40% ≈22%; bottom 50% ≈2%. Dollar stock is a rounded ~$450 trillion (2022-order household wealth), not a WID micro-estimate. Cells rounded to 1,000.