Psychologist Dan Ariely designed a test, a test to see how much the average Joe in the United States knows about their own country’s income equality, or lack of.

Not surprisingly, to me anyway, the overwhelming majority (in the 90% range) of U.S. citizens still think the U.S. is equal when it comes to income distribution.  The reality is that income distribution is so unequal it’s as bad as many African countries: “…if we were to compare us with African countries, dictators in different places, you know, taking a lot of the wealth from normal people, we would be among the top half of the African countries of inequality.  So, the U.S. really has reached an extraordinary level of income inequality.”-Richard Freeman, Harvard economist

Here’s some facts about who holds the most income, and who doesn’t: “People don’t understand how much wealth the top 20% have.  They actually have 84% of the wealth.  And they think they have much less.  And more disturbingly, people don’t understand how little wealth the bottom of the distribution have.  The bottom 40% of the U.S. have about 0.3% of the wealth, basically zero.  And people think they have much more than that.”-Dan Ariely

This is what I call frogs in a economic boiling pot; by the time they realize they’re being screwed it could be too late to do anything about it!

But here’s a really interesting fact: “In the last 30 years or so, the share of national, of income that has gone to the upper 0.1%, not to the upper 1.0%, 0.1%, rose by 10 percentage points. That is one of the most astounding patterns I have ever seen in data.”-Richard Freeman

That’s right, the segment of society in the United States, that’s seen the most growth to their wealth, makes up only 0.1% of the population!

To see more on this important study, and WAKE UP AMERICA, go to PBS News Hour.