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To numerous Americans, the financial landscape over the past five years has been tough. Prices have skyrocketed while salaries remains flat. Elevated mortgage rates have made buying a home a dismal prospect. The rate of unemployment has been slowly rising.

Most people have reported they're postponing major life decisions, including having kids or switching jobs, because of economic uncertainty. But for a very small group of people, the recent half-decade couldn't have been any better.

Wealth Explosion

The assets of the world's billionaires grew 54% in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. And even throughout all the financial uncertainty, the stock market has only continued to grow. This increase has primarily advantaged just a limited group of Americans: 10% of the population controls 93% of stock market wealth.

As uneven as this distribution seems, it's the system working as it is currently designed.

"Rich elites have bought their jets, they've bought their multiple houses and mansions, but now they're acquiring senators and media outlets," explained wealth disparity expert Chuck Collins. "We're now stepping into this other chapter of maximum resource removal where the wealthy are exploiting the system of inequality."

Understanding Wealth Tiers

To help others comprehend what exactly it means to be "affluent" in the US, Collins utilizes a concept from journalist Robert Frank who, in a 2007 book on the rich, conceptualized the different levels of wealth as "Affluencia" villages: Affluent Town, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan and Billionaireville.

To contemporize the concept, Collins categorizes these "economic communities" based on income levels:

• At the base level, Affluent Town, are the 10 million Americans who have a household income of at least $110,000 and an overall wealth of over $1.5m.
• The villages get more exclusive as wealth goes up: Lower Richistan has 2.6 million households who have wealth between $6m and $13m.
• Middle Richistan has 1.3 million households who have assets worth an average of $37m.
• Upper Richistan, made up of 130,000 Americans (roughly the size of a small city) has between $60m to $1bn in wealth.

Collectively, the residents of these villages comprise the top 10% of the wealth income distribution, about 14 million Americans altogether, though their lifestyles vary dramatically.

"You could be in Lower Richistan, and you're still traveling in the coach section of a commercial plane," Collins explained. "Whereas in Upper Richistan, you're traveling via a private jet. That's a really separate reality. You fly private, you have no stakes in the commercial aviation system. You don't care if the whole system fails – you're set."

The Billionaireville Effect

The peak in "Richistan" is Billionaireville, which is made up of about 800 American billionaires who are some of the world's most affluent. The influence that this group has greatly exceeds those who are simply affluent, let alone the average American who doesn't live in "Richistan" at all.

But Collins thinks the progressive slogan "end extreme wealth" fails to address the core issue and has a "whiff of exterminism" to it.

"It's the distinction between private conduct and a framework of policies," Collins explained. "We should be worried about an economic system that directs so much wealth upward to the billionaires."

Fortune Building Strategies

To understand how wealth at the billionaire level works, Collins separates it into four parts: acquiring fortune, securing fortune, policy control and extreme wealth removal.

When many Americans think about wealth, they usually think exclusively about the first step, Collins said. People can create a modest amount of wealth through creating or operating a successful business, which could get them membership in Affluent Town.

But getting to Billionaireville requires significant resources and strategy in those next three steps. Collins describes what he calls the "fortune security field": the tax lawyers, accountants and wealth managers who use their expertise to ensure that the super rich are being strategic about their taxes.

"Wealth defense professionals use a broad range of tools such as legal entities, international accounts, secret corporations, philanthropic entities and other mechanisms to hold assets," he explains.

Government Power and Extreme Wealth Removal

To advance a wealth defense strategy, a family needs political support. Wealth of over $40m converts to political power, Collins says, and can be used to secure fortune and maintain expansion.

The ultimate step is a different kind of wealth accumulation, one that Collins calls "hyper extraction" to describe how the wealthy have come to touch nearly every single part of an Americans' daily existence largely through investment firms, which allows wealthy individuals to support private companies.

"Private equity is looking for those sectors of the economy where they can increase profits a little bit harder," Collins said. "One thing I don't think people comprehend is these billionaire private-equity funds are what happens when so much wealth is parked in so few hands, and they can essentially pivot and say, 'Where else can we generate returns out of the economy?' Healthcare? Great. Mobile home parks? These people can't go anywhere, [so] you can raise their rents."

The Real Consequences

The consequences of this inequality go beyond the wealth getting wealthier. It's about people facing higher costs for their healthcare, rent and vet bills without seeing any significant salary growth. And Collins said the suffering and anger of this kind of society can lead to serious unrest.

"The most powerful oligarchs understand people are being marginalized [and] are economically suffering," Collins said, adding that right-leaning leaders have been good at accessing a potent "phony populism".

Policy Situation

The contradiction, Collins points out in his book, is that elected representatives have appointed a string of billionaires to administrative posts. Along with tech billionaires who had short yet influential roles overseeing significant decreases to the federal workforce, other key positions for commerce, treasury, education and the interior are also all billionaires.

This administrative framework, along with help from political partners, helped pass huge tax bills, which will make enduring decreases for the wealthy and corporations.

Potential Changes

While legislative bodies continue to argue that foreign entry and poor economic deals are the source of everyone's economic problems, "the issue remains: Will the other major party, which has also been captured by the billionaires and big money, be able to seriously confront the underlying harms?" Collins said.

Left-leaning officials, he argues, know what policies are needed to "reverse the updraft of wealth", including significant reforms to the tax system, boosting the minimum wage and empowering worker groups.

"It was so, so close, and the bill really did reflect the will of the majority of people who really want lawmakers to solve some of these pressing issues," Collins said. "Elite control is not about developing so much as blocking. It's easier to block than it is to make something meaningful happen, but the muscle memory is there. We know what that looks like."

Collins is positive that there can be change, but said it would require continuous government action.

"It may be sooner than expected that the pendulum swings back, and then it really is about preserving a continuous public campaign to make progress on this severe disparity we're living in," he said. "We can address this. It is fixable."