John Steele Gordon

“This prosperity was widely shared among the population. Although in the 1770s the top 20 percent of the population owned about two-thirds of the wealth, while the bottom 20 percent owned only 1 percent, that raw datum gives a distorted picture because it does not take time into account. (Modern statistics do exactly the same thing, now usually for tendentious, political reasons.) The population of British North America was a very young one, and children usually do not possess significant wealth. As people get older they tend to get richer, and that was certainly true in the thirteen colonies. One economic historian has calculated that of the colonial population in their forties, only about 8 percent would have been considered poor by the standards of the day, and even fewer in their fifties.”
― John Steele Gordon, An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power