This is chapter 2 of a set of ideas I’m putting together that may (or may not) end up as a short book, pamphlet etc. I am continually trying to understand how to make the world a better place. This is one set of proposals. I’m happy to hear feedback! Please share. If you are able, start to engage in sharing your wealth with others. You can start with your family, but you can then branch out to others!

The Floor

The number almost nobody has

The first step is a number, and it reframes everything that follows.

The U.S. stock market is worth somewhere around $75 trillion. There are about 255 million adult citizens in this country. Divide the one by the other and you get a little under $300,000 apiece.

That is every adult’s even share of American business — not income, equity. A claim on the machines, the brands, the buildings, the software, and the future profits of the entire economy. Sit with it for a second, because it’s a real number. Then sit with the part that should stop you cold: almost nobody has anything close to it.

That $300,000 is a mean — the whole pie divided by all of us. It is not what the typical person holds, because the pie isn’t split anything like evenly. The top 10% of households own about 87% of all stocks. The top 1% alone own about half of all equities — more than the entire bottom 90% combined. The bottom 50% of Americans own roughly 1% of stocks. And ownership isn’t even that widespread to begin with: only about 58% of adults own any stock at all, and that number recently ticked down. The median household holds around $39,000 in financial assets outside their home. Counting everyone, the median retirement savings across all households is closer to $27,000.

So the average adult’s fair share of the market is $300,000, and the typical person’s actual share is a small fraction of that.

That gap — between the mean and the reality — is where this book starts. But it isn’t what the book is about. Closing it by shrinking the top doesn’t work, as we’ll see, and I’m not much interested in the gap for its own sake anyway. What the book is about is the other way to close it: a shareholder society, where every citizen owns a real, voting piece of the productive economy. And it’s about what that does — not only to the numbers, but to the people who become owners, and to the society they build once they are. The gap is the symptom. The shareholder society is the subject.

The floor, not the gap

I want to be careful about what that gap is and isn’t, because this is where most people take the argument somewhere I don’t want it to go.

The obvious reaction to “the top owns almost everything” is: take some of it back and hand it out. That is not the engine of this book, and I’ll spend a whole chapter later on why the crude version — seize the existing fortunes, cut everyone a check — doesn’t even work. I’ll also be honest, up front, that what I end up proposing isn’t zero redistribution. There’s some in it. But it’s redistribution done a particular way — forward, through ownership rather than a handout, and built slowly — and it’s a means, not the point. The point is the floor.

The right question was never “how big is the gap.” It’s “is the person at the bottom getting access to more over time — a roof, clean water, transportation, energy, care, the next useful thing?” If the floor keeps rising, the gap can stay wide and I’m fine with it. Inequality of outcome at the top is the price of a system that keeps inventing things. Inequality of access at the bottom is the thing worth attacking.

So this is not a book about flattening anything. It’s a book about the floor — how high it is, what holds it down, and how you raise it.

Floor = income ÷ cost

Let me say plainly what “the floor” even is, because I’ll use the word on every page. The floor is not a dollar amount in an account. It’s access — to the things that make a life better. A roof over your head, water you can drink, a way to get to work, power, medicine, schooling, and whatever the next useful thing turns out to be. When I say the floor rises, I mean an ordinary person can reach more of those things than they could before. That’s the whole target. Everything else is machinery for hitting it.

And the livability of that floor is a fraction:

Floor = income ÷ cost of living.

Two levers, not one. You raise the floor by pushing on either term — raise what a person can claim, or lower what living costs — and if you do both they multiply. A modest stake in a cheap world beats a big stake in an expensive one. Almost everything in this book is either about getting each person wealthier or making the things they need cheaper.

Here’s the trap you have to see before any of it works, though. You cannot just raise the income side by handing people money and expect the floor to rise. If a lot of people suddenly have more to spend, they spend it on the same things everyone else is chasing — housing, care, the daily necessities — and the extra dollars just bid the prices up. Cost climbs to swallow the raise. That’s demand-pull inflation, and it’s the reason a sudden transfer mostly reprices the floor instead of raising it.

Which is why the two levers aren’t really independent, and why this has to happen gradually. You have to expand people’s ability to buy and expand what gets produced, so the new demand is met by new supply instead of by higher prices. The market can do that supply response — building the housing, training the caregivers, standing up the production — but it takes time. So the honest version of this project isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a build you pace, over years, so purchasing power and production rise together. Move too fast on the money alone and you inflate the very floor you’re trying to raise.

You can’t slice your way there

Before I get to the two levers, I have to kill the reflex — because if I don’t, you’ll spend the whole book waiting for me to just say “tax the rich,” and half of you will stop listening when I don’t.

So let me put a number on why dividing up what already exists can’t do this job. Pick a genuinely livable retirement stake — enough that, with Social Security, a person clears somewhere around $44,000 to $54,000 a year. Work backward to what every adult would need to hold today to compound to that by 65, band by band, and add it up.

Here’s the fuller version — a $750,000 stake at 65, which throws off about $30,000 a year at a safe withdrawal rate, or roughly $54,000 with Social Security:

Age band	Adults	Stake needed / person	Years to grow	Cost of the band
18–24	31.6M	$38,200	~44	$1.2T
25–34	48.4M	$70,200	~35	$3.4T
35–44	45.9M	$138,200	~25	$6.3T
45–54	42.4M	$271,800	~15	$11.5T
55–64	45.2M	$534,600	~5	$24.2T
65–74	36.7M	$750,000	0	$27.5T
75+	26.8M	$750,000	0	$20.1T
Total	277M	—	—	$94.3T

Look at the total: $94.3 trillion. The entire U.S. stock market is about $75 trillion. So at this target you cannot get there by dividing up what already exists — the bill is bigger than the whole pie.

Run it leaner, at a $500,000 target (about $20,000 a year from the portfolio, roughly $44,000 with Social Security):

Age band	Stake needed / person	Cost of the band
18–24	$25,500	$0.8T
25–34	$46,800	$2.3T
35–44	$92,100	$4.2T
45–54	$181,200	$7.7T
55–64	$356,400	$16.1T
65–74	$500,000	$18.4T
75+	$500,000	$13.4T
Total	—	$62.8T

At $500,000 the whole thing costs about $62.8 trillion, which does fit inside $75 trillion. But notice what “fitting” would mean if you did it by confiscation: you’d be handing over about 84% of the entire stock market — and even that wouldn’t produce equality, because the 16% left over would still sit mostly with the people at the top.

So confiscation fails twice over: there isn’t enough to go around, and the moment you start seizing built companies you kill the thing that makes the pie grow in the first place. (And that’s before you even get to the inflation problem from a page ago — dumping that much purchasing power into the economy at once would reprice everything anyway.) This is the point I’ve been making since 2018, now with a number attached: you cannot slice your way to a floor. The pie has to grow, and everyone has to get a real piece of the growth.

That’s the line between this book and every “tax the billionaires” plan you’ve heard. I’m not trying to redistribute the wealth that exists — not as the main move. I’m trying to build ownership that doesn’t yet. I’ll admit there’s a little redistribution laced through what follows, and I won’t pretend it away; the honest question is never whether but how. And the cleanest, fairest, cheapest place to start is with the people who hold the one thing that turns a small stake into a large one: time. It starts with the young. How far it can reach the people already in the middle of their working lives — the ones without decades left to compound — is the genuinely hard part, and I’ll come back to it rather than wave it away.

The map

Everything else fits into six points. Think of them as the argument in miniature, and the rest of the chapters as each one worked out in full.

1. The measure is the floor, not the gap. Success is the bottom’s absolute access rising over time. The ceiling can do what it likes.
2. Floor = income ÷ cost. Two levers, moved together and gradually — because raising claims without raising production just bids up prices. Everything else raises income or lowers cost.
3. Lower the cost of living through disruption. New things reach the poor by competing against non-consumption — Clayton Christensen’s term for serving people who were priced out entirely, at a price point that didn’t exist before. That’s how anyone gets their first car, their first anything.
4. Where prices won’t fall, something is blocking them. When a necessity stays expensive for decades, the cause is almost always a captured rule — zoning, licensing, a credential monopoly — not physics. Find the constraint, remove it.
5. Raise what people can claim through universal ownership. As automation thins out wages, a share replaces the paycheck as the ordinary person’s claim on what the machine produces. If your labor isn’t needed, your shares are how you eat.
6. The shares have to carry a real vote. Ownership without governance is just a dividend check. Whoever votes the shares runs the economy — so the vote has to reach the actual citizen.

Points 3 and 4 are the cost lever, and they get their own chapter. Point 5 is the ownership lever, and it gets the most argument of all, because it’s the one that has to survive a world where the machine needs almost no one to run it. Point 6, the vote, turns out to matter far more than a footnote about corporate governance, and it gets its own treatment too. Points 1 and 2 are this chapter: watch the floor, and remember it’s a fraction.

Where we go from here

One fraction, two levers, a rule against the shortcut, and a promise to move at a pace that builds supply instead of just bidding up prices. That’s the frame.

The rest of the book is the levers. First, the ownership stake — a real, voting share for every citizen, why it’s the only floor that doesn’t need a wall to hold it up, and how you keep the machine ownable while it tries three different ways to slip out of reach. Then the cost side — driving the price of the necessities that actually decide a life down until they reach the people fancy never could. And underneath both, the question I’ll save for last but never lose sight of: what is the floor actually for? Because the deepest claim in this book isn’t about money at all. It’s that making an ordinary person a real owner — one with a vote — changes how they stand in the world, and changes the society built out of people who stand that way.

The $1,000 the government now seeds into every newborn’s account is a genuinely good start — the mechanism is right, and it proves the country can actually do this. So let’s see what it would take to carry every newborn from that seed all the way to a successful retirement.