Insider Monkey
30 Richest Cities in the United States
Ty Haqqi
10 min read

In This Article:

In this article we take a look at the 30 richest cities in the United States. Click to skip ahead and jump to the 10 richest cities in the United States.

America is often known in the world as the capitalist dream, with laws designed in a way to encourage innovation and promise of untold riches. There are dozens of success stories of companies starting from garages, and becoming some of the biggest companies in the world, such as Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Amazon. The success of these companies have made some of them cross the $1 trillion threshold, while the owners have made tens of billions of dollars, some even crossing a hundred billion in net worth. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $175 billion today, having more money than several countries across the world.

While these stories are told to everyone to show how America gives everyone equal opportunity, and success only depends on hard work, this theme falls afoul of the fallacy known as the survivorship bias. What survivorship bias means is that we tend to focus on the success stories i.e. those who made it rather than those who did not because of a lack of visibility. This is despite the fact that the vast majority comprises of those who have not made it, and that there are unique conditions that have led to success in these cases, including a huge amount of luck, which has no logical explanation behind it.

Pixabay/Public Domain

The wealth distribution in America is incredible for all the wrong reasons. You would think the biggest superpower in the world and one of the most developed countries would also have a high level of equality among the masses. The truth is a complete 180 turn, with wealth inequality in the US being incredibly high. The wealthiest 1% of Americans hold an amazing 40% of all wealth. The bottom 90% hold less than 25% of the total wealth. 25% of the total families in US don't even have $10,000. And this isn't a common theme throughout history, it has actually increased significantly over time. In 1989, the bottom 90% had a third of all wealth, now down to a quarter. The wealth of the top 1% was 30% then, still a lot, but at least 10% below what it is now. 84% of the families in the US have less wealth than the mean for the country. Why that is, I will explain later on in the methodology section. In fact, this high concentration of wealth and relative inequality is why many propose a strict progressive system for taxation, to increase the tax on ultra high net worth individuals, which has of course been strongly opposed since these are the men and women who directly or indirectly, exert a huge amount of influence and control.

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