A New York Superlative

The mean income of the top 5 percent of households in Manhattan soared 9 percent in 2013 over 2012, giving Manhattan the biggest dollar income gap of any county in the country, according to data from the Census Bureau The top 5 percent of households earned $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which is being released Thursday and covers the final year of the Bloomberg administration.

The meaning of this statistic, which still maintains a limited ability to shock in our post-Piketty era, will magically unravel itself in due time as many of the remaining the poor find themselves simply pushed off the island — by rising rents, by new condos, by eminent domain — and the upper bounds of wealth begin to resemble the needle-thin skyscrapers being constructed to contain so much that wealth: an asymptote reaching toward infinity.