I'd be curious what wealth levels they are looking at, what they consider 'rich', and at what point the wealth is 'lost'. Because I highly doubt the majority o

I'd be curious what wealth levels they are looking at, what they consider 'rich', and at what point the wealth is 'lost'. Because I highly doubt the majority of families who are worth > $500 million run that down to 'zero'. What holds true for families who have > $1 million, doesn't necessarily hold true for families who have > $500 million. Dynastic wealth in Europe usually means owning private banks, wineries, châteaux, lands, etc... In the US, I'd be thinking of families who are large landowners, and have massive amounts of private wealth. We're not talking about people who gained wealth from a single business in the patriarch/matriarch's lifetime, but rather people whose entire wealth derives from rent-seeking/inheritance. The 1% is more of a euphemism for the top 0.01%. We're not talking about anyone who, at any point, was ever 'working class'. Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' wealth probably will disappear; the Rockefellers, Mellons and Rothschilds of this world have done a comparatively good job at holding on to wealth. And there's far more of them than there are rich entrepreneurs... When you talk about inherited wealth, there's plenty of families who aren't on the Forbes' list, still worth billions. And one note - as many economists have stated, dynastic wealth is still rather young in the US. Historically, in Europe the upper classes derived much of their wealth from land and property, which in Europe is comparatively very expensive because of its scarcity relative to population. For most of the US' history, land has been comparatively cheap. Also, the US has at various times broken up monopolies and redistributed wealth much more radically than western Europe. The US' relative equality is due to its socialist tendencies at various points in history.