A distribution measured in height
An interactive project called The Climb is using the height of stacked $100 bills to show the scale of wealth inequality in the United States. The visualization places American households into percentile columns, from the poorest group through the top 1%, and represents the net worth associated with each point as a physical stack.
The result is designed to make a statistical distribution tangible. The project says the median household's stack would stand about nine inches high. By contrast, the average for households in the top 1% would reach roughly 145 feet. The chart continues into the top 0.1%, a group the site describes as about 136,095 households.
Those comparisons are not all drawn from the same dataset. For percentiles one through 99, the creators say they estimate net worth using the Federal Reserve's 2023 Survey of Consumer Finances and adjust the values into 2026 dollars with a 1.1 multiplier. The poorest 8% are displayed with their reported debt, allowing the graphic to extend below zero rather than treating every household as holding positive wealth.
For the top 1%, the project uses the Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts for the first quarter of 2026. That distinction matters because averages at the top of the distribution can be heavily influenced by the largest fortunes, while percentile estimates describe points along the broader household distribution.
A printable argument
The Climb is meant to work both on screen and in physical space. Its creators offer a companion PDF and encourage readers to print and assemble the full chart on a wall. That format makes the disparity in column heights part of the message: most of the distribution remains compact while the upper end rapidly expands beyond an ordinary room.
The site also includes illustrative “think” and “ideal” distributions based on a 2011 study by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely. The creators explicitly describe those values as spread across percentiles for illustration, separating perceptions and preferences from the measured wealth estimates.
The visualization follows an earlier tradition of presenting wealth inequality through scaled physical comparisons, including a video that inspired the project. Its contribution is an updated, inspectable presentation that identifies the underlying datasets and methodology while making the gap visible without requiring readers to interpret a conventional financial chart. The figures remain estimates assembled from survey and distributional accounts, but the source notes give readers a way to distinguish measured inputs from the project's illustrative elements.
