Clustering the Top 1%: Asset Analysis in R – freeCodeCamp

The recent tax reform bill passed in the US has raised a lot of questions about wealth distribution in the country. While there's been a lot of focus on how the tax plan will impact income, there's been less attention focused on how this plan impacts the assets of wealthy households. The goal of this post is to show how the R programming language can be used to data mine publicly available sources to better understand the net worth of affluent households in the US. To answer these questions, we present descriptive statistics of this survey data and perform cluster analysis on affluent households, which we identify as households with a net worth of more than $1,000,000 USD. Based on the survey data, our analysis shows that the net worth of the top 1% of households in the US is $10.4M and the net worth of the top 0.1% of households is $43.2M.