Bottom Half of America Doubled Its Wealth Since 2019, Fed Data Shows

By Daniel Okafor

The bottom 50% of American households more than doubled their collective net worth between 2019 and 2026, rising from $1.86 trillion to $4.28 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data cited by MarketWatch columnist Robert Ross. That is a 129% gain in nominal terms. Adjusted for CPI, it is still roughly 78% in real terms.

Yet public sentiment tells the opposite story. Ross, founder of TikStocks and author of "A Beginner's Guide to High-Risk, High-Reward Investing," argues in his Nov. 1 "Outside the Box" column that two forces hide the improvement: partisan perception swings and engagement-driven social media algorithms.

How much wealthier did the bottom half actually get?

Go back further and the numbers grow larger. Since 2010, net worth for the bottom 50% has increased tenfold, Ross writes. He calls that real progress for the least fortunate Americans.

Other Fed figures reinforce the picture:

• Inflation-adjusted median family net worth reached $215,900 in the Fed's latest Survey of Consumer Finances.
• 55% of American adults say they hold enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses, according to Fed data.

Ross says those two data points alone "poke a major hole in the popular 'Americans are living paycheck to paycheck' narrative."

Generational data points the same way. Federal Reserve research comparing generations at the same ages found that each of the past four generations enjoyed higher inflation-adjusted household incomes than the one before it. Millennials in their late 30s, for example, earn more than Gen X households did at comparable ages.

Where does the gloom come from?

Housing is the genuine weak spot, and Ross concedes it. Baby boomers faced much higher mortgage rates, but homes generally cost around three times household income. Today they cost nearly five times the income, while buyers still deal with elevated mortgage rates.

"Housing is a real problem worth fixing. But progress and problems can exist at the same time," Ross writes.

Politics supplies the rest of the gap between data and mood. University of Michigan researchers have documented a large partisan divide in economic perception. When political control changes, supporters of the incoming party turn optimistic while the other side turns gloomy. The pattern appeared after the 2016 election, reversed after 2020, and repeated after 2024.

Ross puts it dryly: it seems the only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the $30 trillion U.S. economy turns on a dime when their party takes power.

Prediction markets heavily favor Democrats retaking the House in the November midterms and give them a meaningful chance at the Senate, he notes. If control flips, millions of Americans will likely wake up the next morning convinced the economy improved or deteriorated overnight, based mainly on party affiliation.

What does the algorithm do to the picture?

A 2026 study published in Nature found that engagement-driven social media algorithms amplified political content, moral outrage and toxic material while increasing users' perceptions of hostility between political groups.

Ross has seen the incentive structure from the inside. Since 2020, his investing content has generated more than 150 million views across Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. His verdict is blunt: "Outrage, fear and conflict routinely outperform nuance."

He offers one comparison that explains the distortion. "The bottom half of Americans has gotten substantially wealthier" is terrible engagement bait. "America is collapsing and your political opponents caused it" works considerably better.

The mechanism is simple. Algorithms learn what makes users angry, afraid or vindicated, then serve more of it, because engagement means more time on the app and more ad inventory. Over time, personalized feeds start feeling like objective reality.

This is not a Gen Z problem alone. Younger Americans spend enormous time on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but older Americans are hardly offline. Nearly half of Americans over 65 use Facebook daily, and social media users in that age group spend roughly an hour and 40 minutes per day across platforms, Ross writes.

What does this mean for investors?

Ross draws an investment conclusion from the data gap. Elections create winners and losers in individual industries, but he prefers owning businesses capable of prospering across political cycles over building a portfolio around predicting Washington.

He points to Warren Buffett, who has stated numerous times that betting against America is a losing proposition. "I don't think this time is different. Even if my algorithm tells me otherwise," Ross writes.

His summary of the underlying facts: the bottom half is wealthier, median family wealth is higher, younger generations earn more than previous generations did at the same ages, and most Americans who want a job have one. Whoever occupies the White House, he argues, deserves far less credit or blame for that record than the public tends to assign.

The so-what for markets: if perception gaps this wide persist, they can misprice consumer-facing stocks and sentiment-driven assets — a reason to weight Fed distribution data over social media mood when sizing the U.S. consumer.