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Among countless US citizens, the financial landscape over the past five years has been challenging. Expenses have escalated while salaries remains stagnant. Steep mortgage rates have made buying a home a grim prospect. The rate of unemployment has been creeping up.

Most people have indicated they're putting off major life decisions, including starting a family or switching jobs, because of the instability. But for a tiny fraction of people, the last five years couldn't have been more prosperous.

Fortune Expansion

The wealth of the world's billionaires increased 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even amid all the financial uncertainty, the stock market has only continued to grow. This growth has mostly helped just a limited group of Americans: 10% of the population controls 93% of stock market wealth.

However unequal as this division seems, it's the economic framework working as it is currently designed.

"Affluent individuals have acquired their jets, they've bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they're acquiring senators and media outlets," commented inequality researcher Chuck Collins. "We're now entering this other chapter of maximum resource removal where the wealthy are exploiting the system of inequality."

Mapping Economic Classes

To help others grasp what exactly it means to be "rich" in the US, Collins adopts a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, imagined the different levels of wealth as "Wealthville" villages: Prosperity Village, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.

To contemporize the concept, Collins categorizes these "affluence districts" based on income levels:

• At the lowest tier, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a family earnings of at least $110,000 and an overall wealth of over $1.5m.
• The villages get more restricted as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m.
• Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m.
• Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.

Altogether, the residents of these villages make up the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their circumstances vary dramatically.

"You could be in Lower Richistan, and you're still traveling in the coach section of a commercial plane," Collins explained. "Whereas in Upper Richistan, you're flying in a private jet. That's a really different cultural experience. You fly private, you have no stakes in the commercial aviation system. You don't care if the whole system fails – you're set."

The Billionaireville Effect

The highest hill in "Richistan" is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world's richest. The control that this group has far surpasses those who are simply well-off, let alone the typical citizen who doesn't live in "Richistan" at all.

But Collins thinks the activist mantra "end extreme wealth" fails to address the core issue and has a "suggestion of eradication" to it.

"It's the difference between individual behaviors and a system of rules," Collins commented. "We should be worried about an economic system that channels so much wealth upward to the billionaires."

The Four Pillars of Billionaire Wealth

To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins separates it into four parts: acquiring fortune, securing fortune, government influence and hyper-extraction.

When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think solely about the first step, Collins said. People can create a reasonable quantity of wealth through creating or operating a successful business, which could get them admission in Affluent Town.

But getting to Billionaireville requires substantial commitment and planning in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the "fortune security field": the tax lawyers, accountants and wealth managers who use their skills to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.

"Wealth defense professionals use a extensive selection of tools such as legal entities, foreign deposits, undisclosed businesses, charitable foundations and other mechanisms to hold assets," he explains.

Government Power and Extreme Wealth Removal

To advance a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m becomes political power, Collins says, and can be used to secure fortune and protect its accumulation.

The last stage is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls "hyper extraction" to describe how the wealthy have come to influence nearly every single part of an Americans' routine activities largely through investment firms, which allows wealthy individuals to fund private companies.

"Private equity is searching for those sectors of the economy where they can extract value a little bit harder," Collins said. "One thing I don't think people understand is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is stored in so few hands, and they can essentially pivot and say, 'Where else can we generate returns out of the economy?' Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can't go anywhere, [so] you can increase their costs."

The Real Consequences

The consequences of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It's about people facing higher costs for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any significant salary growth. And Collins said the suffering and anger of this kind of society can lead to serious unrest.

"The most powerful wealthy elites understand people are being excluded [and] are monetarily hurting," Collins said, adding that Republicans have been good at connecting with a potent "phony populism".

Government Truth

The paradox, Collins points out in his book, is that political leaders have appointed a succession of billionaires to administrative posts. Along with tech billionaires who had temporary but significant roles overseeing significant decreases to the federal workforce, other crucial appointments for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.

This political landscape, along with help from political partners, helped pass major tax legislation, which will make lasting reductions for the wealthy and corporations.

The Path Forward

While legislative bodies continue to argue that foreign entry and unfavorable commercial treaties are the source of everyone's economic problems, "the question becomes: Will the alternative political group, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to meaningfully address the underlying harms?" Collins said.

Progressive politicians, he argues, know what policies are needed to "change wealth distribution", including significant reforms to the tax system, boosting the minimum wage and supporting labor organizations.

"It was so, so close, and the bill really did reflect the will of the bulk of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these pressing issues," Collins said. "Oligarchic power is not about building so much as blocking. It's easier to block than it is to make something significant occur, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like."

Collins is positive that there can be change, but said it would require sustained political momentum.

"It may be quickly that the balance shifts, and then it really is about maintaining a continuous public campaign to make progress on this profound imbalance we're living in," he said. "We can solve this. It is addressable."