> Hey, you economic historians out there! Is there nowadays a greater
> proportion of people (let's say globally) owning a greater proportion of
> stock than in the past?
Nope. Stock ownership is, globally speaking, largely institutional these days; individual holdings have plummeted compared to institutional holdings since the 1950s. The US is the only major country to retain sizeable individual shareholdings, but these are a distinct minority of total holdings. Also, as Doug's "Wall Street" points out, a study in 1995 found that when you sort households by stock ownership, you find that the top 5% of stock-owning households held 94.5% of the stocks held by individual (pg 67).
The worker with $1 million in retirement funds isn't some rich bourgie, though. Given ever-increasing lifespans, and assuming you retire at age 65, that's only $50,000 a year over maybe 20 years, and that's assuming no catastrophic medical emergencies or Enron-style wipeouts of your rainy day funds.
-- Dennis