This article should be titled: wealth is hard to measure and silly measurement techniques yield silly conclusions. The benefit of wealth is logarithmic (one can debate the appropriate base, eg 2 or 10).. A family’s second million dollars is much less useful than the first, and a family’s 11th million isn’t that important at all. The faux “inequality” created by stock market swings would disappear upon adjustment for the logarithmic effect. This adjustment would also give proper weight to what happens in the middle and bottom of the labor market— having $5000 in your bank account is much better than having $500 and having $50k begins to confer a degree of independence.