Having profiled the richest Americans in the previous chapter, I now turn my attention to the rest of the distribution: the middle class and the poor. First, the middle class. While the middle class does not control anything like the amount of wealth that those in the top wealth-holding categories do, the sheer size of this class makes it important for both basic research and policy issues. Indeed, it is because the middle class is so large and relatively wealth-poor that there is reason for both interest and concern. Numerically, the middle class is roughly the group of households that comprise the second and third quintiles of the wealth distribution. Substantively, the term middle class means much more than the people who fall between the rich and the poor. When asked to what class they belong, a disproportionate percentage of people claim to be numbers of the middle class. The middle class is the median class, the class that is thought to be average.

As we saw in the previous chapter, a small fraction of the rich controls the bulk of wealth in the United States. Clearly the behavior of the rich can affect the distribution of wealth. Yet because there are so many families in the middle class, their behavior can also have a significant impact on the distribution of wealth. A recent example is the increase in the tendency of the middle class to invest in stocks and mutual funds.