The Market Is Working Fine. The Ownership Is the Problem.

The stock market is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is the whole problem: in Christopher Mims’s Wall Street Journal piece, the top 0.1 percent of American households — roughly 137,000 of them — have more than doubled their combined wealth since the end of 2019. They added $14.5 trillion, about $10 trillion of it from stocks and mutual funds. They now hold about $28 trillion, or 15 percent of the nation’s $186 trillion in household wealth. The bottom half of the country holds $4 trillion, or 2.3 percent. The piece treats the concentration as a political flashpoint and credits it with helping fuel the rise of politicians it identifies as “Democratic socialists,” including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. That framing is worth a second look — and the second look is where the numbers get interesting.

Start with the concession, because it is real and the piece makes it: the bottom half of American households has seen its wealth rise faster in percentage terms than any other group since 2019, on rising home values and pandemic-era relief that swelled accounts and paid down debt. And nobody serious objects to a market rewarding people who own productive assets. That is what a market is. As one of the economists quoted in the piece puts it: “The stock market’s ripping, and so if you’re in the stock market more, it has been really great.” True. The trouble begins the sentence after that, when you ask who was in the market, and with what.

In the year ended June 30, with the S&P 500 up 21 percent, the top 0.1 percent took in nearly $4 trillion of new wealth from the market alone. That is the entire net worth of the bottom half of the United States, delivered in twelve months to 137,000 households. The bottom half’s share of the national total is 2.3 percent — an average of about $63,000 per household. The average household in the top 0.1 percent holds more than 3,000 times as much.

It is worth being precise about who these households are, because the instinct is to picture a very hardworking doctor. They are not mostly salaried workers. In the top 0.1 percent by wealth, 37 percent earn most of their income from businesses, 26 percent from capital gains, and 10 percent from wages and salaries. You do not reach that group by working harder at the job you have. You reach it by owning the thing that pays the job. And the door is not standing still: entry into the group cost $45.8 million as of 2022, the last time the Fed published the detailed data, and with the group’s wealth up roughly 50 percent since, the threshold has moved again.

It is also not simply “the rich pulling away,” as though one broad class were drifting off from the middle. The rest of the top 10 percent gained $38.2 trillion over the same period — split among nearly a hundred times as many households. The ultrawealthy began pulling away from other wealthy people in 2020. That is what a stock market does when the claim on the gains is already yours. It pays you for owning it, and then it pays you again for feeling rich: some of these households borrow against the portfolio to fund the lifestyle, and the rest simply spend more when the market rises. Economists call that the wealth effect. It is a very pleasant thing to experience. It is a design feature, not an accident.

Now back to the frame. The piece describes the concentration as a “political flashpoint” and credits it with helping propel the politicians it labels socialist. Notice where the worry lands: not on the distribution, but on the possibility that people might draw conclusions from the distribution. The same publication recently treated a poll finding that two in five Americans say the stock market only serves the top 1 percent as though the puzzle were that Americans had failed to participate. The market doesn’t serve only the top 1 percent, we are told. Then remind me where a household choosing between rent, groceries, childcare, and a medical bill is supposed to find the money to become an owner. That household has not misplaced its brokerage account. It has never been offered one at a salary that leaves anything behind after the month.

I don’t have a quarrel with markets rewarding owners. I have a quarrel with a design in which the only reliable way to become an owner is to have already been one — in which “join the equity-holding class” is offered as advice to people whose equity is a car they are still paying off. A market can function perfectly while the ownership of it hardens into a class boundary every time asset prices rise. Working perfectly is not the same as distributing well. And the same arithmetic keeps running in other rooms: the ranks of the ultrawealthy jumped 14.4 percent in 2025 on the AI trade — American productivity and American creativity being capitalized into claims held by very few people. The issue is not whether any particular rich person is wicked. The issue is whether a country can call itself broadly free when ownership purchases security, time, education, housing, and the ability to take a risk, and everyone else is invited to admire the machine from the sidewalk.

So what gets built? More owners — not by wishing, but out of institutions that already exist and already work.

Worker cooperatives. The 2024 census counts roughly 820 worker co-op firms in the United States, up from 323 in 2014, with about 10,000 worker-owners and sector employment up more than a third since 2020. Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx — about 2,000 workers in the lowest-wage, highest-turnover sector in the country — has paid its people a living wage for decades. In Mondragon, in the Basque Country, roughly 70,000 people work in some 80 cooperatives doing over €11 billion a year in business, with a top-to-bottom pay ratio the members set by vote at around 5-to-1. American boardrooms chose roughly 300-to-1. Two markets, two numbers. A ratio is a choice, not a law handed down from a mountain. And it is not magic: when Fagor went bankrupt in 2013 carrying about €1.1 billion in debt, the federation did not pour money into a sinking ship — it moved roughly 1,700 of its 1,800 members into other co-ops in the group. Worker ownership does not stop firms from failing. It changes who catches you when they do.

Cooperative finance. If you carry a credit-union card in your wallet, you are already a member-owner of one. About 145 million Americans belong to credit unions — the largest cooperative movement in the country, sitting in wallets from coast to coast, and nobody in line at the drive-through has ever once noticed. About 900 rural electric cooperatives already serve 42 million Americans across 56 percent of the landmass: infrastructure the investor-owned utilities declined to touch, wired by member-owners in the 1930s and still running. America has a long, unglamorous history of owning things together and calling it ordinary.

Public banking. The Bank of North Dakota has been state-owned and profitable every year since 1919. Nobody in Bismarck has ever mistaken it for the Kremlin.

And where the public created the wealth, take a public claim on it. Alaska mails a dividend to every resident, every year, out of resource wealth nobody’s family earned. My Norwegian cousin once described her country’s fund to me with a shrug, the way I would describe a sump pump — that shrug is the entire story, and it is worth wanting. Norway’s version now holds more than $2 trillion, owns a slice of roughly 1.5 percent of every listed company on earth, and works out to more than $390,000 per Norwegian citizen. That is what public ownership of capital looks like when the bookkeeping happens in public: not a command economy, just a citizenry that owns a piece of the thing that pays for the country. And there is the quiet bipartisan case sitting in plain sight — about 6,500 employee-ownership plans covering roughly 15 million workers and more than $2 trillion in assets, the most unadvertised ownership idea in America.

The honest caveat, since I don’t sell utopia. This is harder here than in the Basque Country, and the reason is not that Americans are constitutionally incapable of cooperating. The reason is that our institutions make the easy thing easy and the hard thing hard. A private equity fund needs a loan and a lawyer; it does not need anyone’s permission from the people who work there. A worker buyout needs a bank willing to lend to a structure investors find strange, a market that will not punish them for it, and a legal code that has caught up. Scale tempts even the good examples: Mondragon itself now employs well over 10,000 non-member workers in foreign subsidiaries, which is exactly the compromise a co-op was built to avoid. The Danes, the Swedes, the Basques got where they are after a century of institution-building, strikes, and setbacks — not after one good election. Policy is the visible tip; the institutions are the iceberg. But that is an argument about sequence, not about possibility. Every version of this already exists somewhere in the United States, in the reddest states in the union, mailing checks and paying dividends and turning a profit since 1919.

The stock market will keep doing its job. It will keep converting American productivity, American creativity, and American tax preference into claims, and the claims will keep landing in roughly the same 137,000 households, because that is precisely what they were designed to do. The only real question is whether the rest of the country keeps admiring the machine from the sidewalk — or starts holding a piece of it. The machinery works. The ownership is the part that was chosen, which means it can be chosen differently.