> In 2011, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was split between the five fifths of households, and how they would ideally split it. The Companion spreads those five shares across all 100 percentiles of the 2026 wealth total in a smooth curve (Appendix 3). Many different curves fit five numbers, so these two shapes are only illustrations. The actual bars come from percentile-level data. These two curves do not.
> “What we think” and “Ideal”
> In 2011, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was split between the five fifths of households, and how they would ideally split it. The Companion spreads those five shares across all 100 percentiles of the 2026 wealth total in a smooth curve (Appendix 3). Many different curves fit five numbers, so these two shapes are only illustrations. The actual bars come from percentile-level data. These two curves do not.