The rich are different from you and me...

...Yes, they have more money.

(A famous two-part quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway)

John-Thomas Didymus, based in Lagos, Nigeria, and an anchor for Allvoices, has an article about the reality of money:

Two scholars published a research paper in March of 2014 that sought to explain the seeming discrepancy in the sharp rise in income inequality since the1980s and the relatively modest increase in wealth concentration in the top economic bracket.
While approaching the problem, focusing on the question of how to measure the total wealth of the rich, the duo may have opened a new can of worms on the hidden wealth of the superrich.
In the study, The Distribution of Wealth: Capital Income and Returns since 1913, Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Professor Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, developed a new technique to estimate the wealth of the economic upper classes by capitalizing income tax returns using IRS data on dividends, interests, and rents.
This method is a way of deriving the level of wealth accumulation or net worth by working back from available data on investment income using estimates of rates of return for different categories of assets– a painstaking procedure that requires micro-data on the different categories of investment income.
They found that there has been a greater increase in the concentration of wealth, or, more appropriately, net worth– measured as the value of assets less liabilities– than previously thought, and that previous studies have missed the fact because they failed to detect that the increase was concentrated mostly in the top tenth of one percent.
In a separate paper titled, The Missing Wealth of Nations: Are Europe and US Net Debtors or Net Creditor?, Zucman was able to demonstrate that the official statistics of the wealthiest Western nations significantly underestimates the value of their net foreign assets, largely because they underestimate the total wealth that the superrich have stashed away in secret offshore tax havens.
The implication of Zucman's study is that the superrich are richer than anyone ever suspected. The authors pointed out that the findings of the first paper contradict the findings of previous research based on survey.
The Slate's Jordan Weissmann refers to a previous study by New York University's Edward Wolff, which found that, since the 1990s, households in the top ten percent bracket increased their share of the national wealth considerably.
Wolff's study suggested that the top one percent of households in the US actually dropped some of their share of the national wealth or net worth since the 1980s. But the study had been based on data obtained through government surveys which tend to underestimate the size of the wealth of the superrich and thus the national wealth inequality.
The new study by Saez and Zucman suggests that previous studies have looked at the wrong section of the economic hierarchy for where all the wealth went. According to Saez and Zucman, all the national wealth is actually being sucked up by the top tenth of one percent, whom the authors identify as those with wealth above twenty million dollars.
Saez and Zucman's analysis suggest that, since 1984, the top tenth of one percent of American households with a minimum net worth of about twenty million dollars have doubled their share of the national wealth from about ten percent to about twenty-two percent. The study found that while the top tenth of one percent were able to double their share of the national wealth, thy only managed to increase their share of the total wealth from sixteen percent to about eighteen percent.
Unfortunately, the graphs in the document by Saez and Zucman are not numbered for easy reference. The interested reader should look for the graphs titled Top 0.1 percent wealth share in the US, 1913-2012, Top 1-0.1 percent wealth share in the US, 1913-2012 and Top 1 percent wealth share in US to follow the discussion.
Jordan Weissmann, who received a detailed spreadsheet analysis from the authors, has a convenient graphic representation of the clutter of figures, titled US Wealth Distribution: 1984 v. 2012.
The reader should pause to consider the tremendous significance of the difference between the total wealth held by the top tenth of one percent and the wealth held by the top one percent to the top tenth of one percent. The top one percent hold a total wealth that is about forty percent of the national wealth. When we consider the total wealth of the top one percent of the economic hierarchy in isolation, we find that the top tenth of one percent hold more than fifty percent.
This is remarkable. It reveals that the Occupy movement should not have contrasted the top one percent with the bottom ninety-nine percent, but the top 0.1 percent with the bottom 99.9 percent.
It emerges from the analysis by Saez and Zucman that there is a world of difference between the superrich and the ordinary rich or merely "affluent".
Saez and Zucman were able to show that while the super rich– the top tenth of one percent– have prospered, the top one percent to half a percent have only managed to keep running in the same spot.
In comparison, the top five-tenths of a percent to one tenth of one percent have done slightly better. But it is the top tenth of one percent that has taken the lion's share of wealth gains. The researchers found that the relative gains are even greater with the top 0.01 percent (those with net worth more than a hundred million dollars).
If we call the top tenth of one percent the superrich, what do we call the top hundredth of one percent?
Slate's Timothy Noah suggests we call them the "stinking rich".

Author's note: this is the first installment of a trilogy; Part Two is here:

It is easy to understand Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman's observation that the largest increase in the concentration of wealth is seen in the tenth of one percent wealthiest with a total net worth of over twenty million dollars, and that an even larger but proportional concentration of wealth was seen in the top hundredth of one percent with net worth above a hundred million dollars.
The bigger the income flow, the easier it is to convert any given stream of income in to wealth through savings and investments and, because wealth grows through compounding, those who have achieved a certain threshold of wealth continue to grow it at a faster rate than the upper middle class whose standard of living depends on consuming a larger proportion of a relatively stagnant income flow.
The difference in the ability to grow wealth between the superrich and the affluent upper middle class is reflected in the observation by Saez and Zucman that, while the superrich have grown richer since the 1960s, all others, including the affluent upper middle class, have grown poorer.
Although the top ten percent increased their share of the national wealth, the study found that the top ten to one percent saw a decline in their wealth, although their income has risen over the years.
Similarly, the top one percent have grown their wealth, but nearly all the gains went to the top hundredth of one percent, with the top one to one-tenth percent recording very little gains.
The "stinking rich" who make up the hundredth of one percent, according to Saez and Zucman, have nearly quadrupled their income since 1980, compared with the top tenth of one percent, who doubled it in the same period. Also, in the same period, the middle class, included in the bottom ninety percent, dropped their share of the national wealth from just over thirty percent in 1980 to about twenty-five percent in 2012.
The other paper by Zucman, titled The Missing Wealth of Nations: Are Europe and US Net Debtors or Net Creditors?, provides evidence that more wealth is held in offshore tax havens than previously thought. As Paul Krugman explains in his New York Times blog, Zucman came to that conclusion by examining international data showing the assets and liabilities of the US and European countries. Aggregating the data gives a result which suggests that liabilities significantly outstrip assets. This is an impossible scenario that can only be explained if we assume that the rich have more wealth hidden away in offshore havens than available figures show.
Most citizens of Western countries have become aware of the threat of the international system of offshore tax havens only recently. But scholars from countries that are referred to with a contemptuous sneer as "Third World" have been aware of the problem for decades, and have complained in international forums about how offshore tax havens have facilitated corruption in developing economies, siphoning the wealth of marginal economies to enrich others.
While the richer Western countries were yet to feel the economic impact of capital flight to offshore tax havens, they ignored the complaints of economists and managers from countries with less developed economies, preferring to ascribe the phenomenon of "Third World" underdevelopment exclusively to corruption and mismanagement. They have ignored the fact that the existence of international financial services designed to facilitate capital flight are active accomplices in the corruption that has impoverished the less developed economies of the world.
The discussion sometimes assumed a racist tinge, suggesting that citizens of certain countries are simply not smart enough to manage their own affairs. Recently, racist scholars such as Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen tried to refurbish the scientific racism of the nineteenth century with a publication titled IQ and the Wealth of Nations, which presented the argument that a statistical correlation between national IQ and wealth indicates that the poverty of some nations was due to the low IQ of its citizens rather than vice versa.
It is estimated, for instance, that Nigeria, an oil and gas rich West African nation, producing two million barrels of oil per day, among the world's top exporters of Liquefied Natural Gas, and thus by any standard a medium income country, lost at least four hundred billion dollars in capital flight to offshore tax havens in the past three decades.
The mechanism through which countries like Nigeria that should have grown into thriving medium income economies were bled into abject poverty is being demonstrated in recent years in the process of capital flight from the US economy to offshore tax havens.
The reason why it took longer for Western economies such as the US to feel the impact of capital flight facilitated by the international system of underground wealth is that Western countries started off with a greater capital accumulation.
A recent report which found that the world's superrich have been able to move more than twenty trillion dollars, and possibly more than thirty trillion dollars, to offshore havens underscores the new wisdom dawning on everyone that wealth does not trickle down: it flows offshore. That human greed knows no bounds ensures that a free market capitalist system will implode in the long run, as private individuals continue accumulating mountains of cash beyond all reasonable limits of their needs. As a saying goes: "Capitalism has no cap".

Rico says you can call them whatever you like (stinking rich or super-rich), as long as you call them Rico...