Even though people may know that wealth inequality in the United States is a serious issue, many really don’t realize what it actually means to say that the gap between rich and poor is the worst it’s been in more than a half century. So CBS News came up with an innovative way to explain it to random people in a mall. The result? People were dumbfounded when presented with an illustration of just how wealth is divided in the country.

CBS This Morning co-host Tony Dokoupil set up a table at a mall in West Nyack, New York with a pie that represented $98 trillion of household wealth in the United States. The pie was sliced into 10 pieces and Dokoupil asked people to divide up those pieces onto five plates representing the poorest, the lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and wealthiest Americans.

No one got it right. And, in fact, no one was even kind of close of estimating the real ratio, which involves giving nine pieces to the top 20pc of Americans while the upper middle class and the middle class share one piece between the two of them. The lower middle class would effectively get crumbs considering they only have 0.3 percent of the pie. What about the poorest Americans? They wouldn’t get any pie at all, and in fact would get a bill, considering they are, on average, around $6,000 in debt...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/watch-cbs-journalist-use-pie-illustrate-inequality.html