Wealth Inequality in the United States

The wealth distribution of the United States is a good choice for a pie chart for multiple reasons. 

1. As a DISTRIBUTION, there is an inherent part-to-whole relationship waiting to be visualized.
2. There are only a handful of slices which avoids visual cluttering. 
3. I knew beforehand that the majority of people would own very little (but not to this degree), so it would be good to emphasize and focus on that little slice. 
1. The book "Effective Data Visualization" states "Keeping that rule of thumb in mind, pie charts work best when you have roughly four or fewer wedges and the wedges are either really different from one another in angle or are really similar to each other" 
2. The article "What is a pie chart?" by the website Storytelling With Data states "There are two primary use cases for a pie chart: 1. If you want your audience to have a general sense of the part-to-whole relationship in your data and comparing the precise sizes of the slices is less important. 2. To convey that one segment of the total is relatively small or large."
3. The wealth distribution pie chart follows these guidelines; there are few slices and the main message is simple: the wealth slices of the elite few are generally huge in comparison to the wealth slice of the majority. 

Beyond these reasons justifying my choice of dataset, the pie chart is even better for some formatting decisions. 

1. I followed the book and made sure to get rid of the white borders that Excel has between the slices by default; "But research shows that readers can “read into” these white borders and get a sense that the group making the data is disjointed or unstable (Ziemkiewicz & Kosara, 2010)."
2. Furthermore, I decided to do the other slices in a grayscale (which may be a bit odd). The alternative was having all of the other slices in one shade of gray, which would require borders to differentiate the slices, and borders just don't look good in pie charts, in my opinion. 

I only have a few formatting concerns.

1. I have the double-packed data labels which include both the name of the wealth slice and the value of the wealth. I originally wanted the names on the outside and the values on the inside, but now I think it may be more legible in this consolidated positioning, avoiding looking back and forth as the graph is fairly big. 
2. Both the book ("We tend to read pie charts in a clockwise order (in Western cultures), so start the largest slice at noon and arrange the wedges such that they run greatest to least clockwise around the circle.") and the article ("The right pie is sorted in descending order starting with the largest category (pineapple). This takes into account our natural construct of reading around a circle.") advocate for sorting the slices by size, but I felt that it was more sensible to just keep the order of the groups to avoid confusion. 
3. I originally wanted the groups split by quintiles instead of having wildly different sized groups (but I couldn't find the data) but ultimately, the way it turned out with the entire 50% in that tiny slice is still very impactful (although with a quintile version, the top quintile would have been very huge; and I wonder if that would have been more impactful). 

Lastly, what could represent this better? A bar chart would allow for precise length comparisons to easily show which shares are bigger and a stacked bar chart would emphasize the part-to-whole relationship, but they're not dramatically better than the pie chart which includes the percentages for easy comparison, and it inherently shows a part-to-whole relationship. However, I learnt from my AP Micro and Macro Economics classes about the Gini coefficient and the Lorenz curve, which I think is the best because it better illustrates the populations of these groups, but it's not very beginner-friendly. Anyway, here is a Lorenz Curve of Federal Reserve data from 2019. The Lorenz Curve shows that the wealthiest few own the most of the nation's wealth, and the line of equality demonstrates what the curve would look like if everyone owned an equal share of the nation's wealth.