Jackson Holy $h*t, Those Folks are Rich!

We've had some fun asking friends a question over the past couple of months.

Which U.S. county has the highest average income?

Hint: it's highest by a lot.

Then we wait for the usual answers to roll in. Somewhere around Los Angeles, maybe (Santa Monica? Malibu?). Or New York City. Or DC. Or Florida.

All wrong.

The answer is Teton County, Wyoming, home of Jackson Hole. Its per capita income of $532,903 is nearly double second place, Summit County, Utah, home of Park City. Aspen's home county comes in third. Even among America's fanciest ski towns, Jackson Hole is lapping the field.

OK. So now you know Tetonites are rich on an entirely different level.

But today's Data 4 Thought drills much deeper, into how they are rich. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes the breakdown of the types of income that build to the numbers in the table above. Most Americans work jobs, and the majority of their income comes from paychecks. But when you have really made it, the paycheck becomes the small part. Your money starts making more money than your work does.

The BEA tracks this in a category called dividends, interest, and rent, or "DIR" for short. Think dividend checks (companies paying you a slice of their profits because you own their stock), interest (borrowers paying you for the use of your money), and rental income (tenants paying you to live in property you own). Notice the pattern. In every case, the money shows up because you already own something. One important note: this measure does not include profits from selling stocks or other assets. Not one dollar of capital gains shows up here. So if anything, DIR understates how much money the money is making. It is just the steady trickle coming off the pile, not the pile itself.

How extreme is this in Jackson Hole? In 2024, 77 cents of every dollar of income earned in Teton County came from dividends, interest, and rent. The typical U.S. county sits around 16 cents. And Teton was not always like this. In 1969 it looked almost like everywhere else. Watch it detach from the rest of the country over five decades, with its fellow resort towns trailing behind.

That is the share of income. Now let's talk dollars. We pulled per-person DIR income for every U.S. county from 1969 through 2024, converted everything to 2024 dollars, and built the racing chart below showing the top 15 counties over time. Click play and watch the nation's wealth compound in its fanciest resort towns.

So what should we make of this? A few takeaways, all in 2024 dollars:

Not like us

So how are we all feeling about this? About data showing that the surest path to extreme wealth in America is to already have extreme wealth in America?

Yes, there are exceptions. The immigrant who arrives with nothing, starts the tech firm, and makes billions. It happens, and the story matters. In fact, it has to happen for the game to work. If nobody ever won from the outside, the Dream would lose its grip, and people might start looking at the ladder and noticing how few of its rungs still exist.

Look, the path of least resistance is clear in the data. There is no "enough" in Teton, or Pitkin, or Blaine, or Summit. There is just more. Endless more.

And to be clear about the target here. This is not about the bartenders, teachers, and ski patrollers of Jackson, most of whom cannot afford to live anywhere near where they work. The average is doing the heavy lifting in these numbers, dragged skyward by a small number of enormous fortunes. That is exactly the point.

Meanwhile, more than 70 million Americans rely on Medicaid and CHIP. More than 40 million rely on SNAP. More than 20 million children get a free or reduced-price lunch at school. The median American household earns about $80,000 a year before taxes. The average Teton County resident's portfolio throws that off in about ten weeks, without anyone lifting a finger.

Is this just America now? Is this the best we can do? Do we just let this gravitational pull run to infinity?

Here is one thing I found "coincidental." Every August, the most important monetary policy gathering in the world is held in, you guessed it, Teton County, Wyoming. The Kansas City Fed has hosted its annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole since 1982. The story goes that the location was chosen in part because Paul Volcker loved fly fishing. I got a chuckle out of that when this data came together.

Because think about the irony. Monetary policy is supposed to serve all of us. The Fed holds the master dials of the American economy: the price of a mortgage, the interest on a credit card, the odds of keeping a job through a downturn. And when its leaders gather to think big thoughts about that economy, they do it in the one county in America where the residents, on average, need their help the least. If you are collecting more than $400,000 a year just in dividends, interest, and rent, you are conservatively sitting on something like $10 million in assets. You are good. You won the American game. It is the rest of the country that needs the Fed's attention. And yet every summer, the Fed goes and visits the winners.

So, Chairman Warsh. You were sworn in a few weeks ago promising to rethink how the Fed does business. You have task forces studying everything from communications to data. Here is another idea, and this one will save you money: move the summit. This year's gathering is already booked, six weeks from now, at a lodge inside Grand Teton National Park. Fine. Enjoy the view. But next year, hold it in West Dayton, Ohio, where the median household gets by on $36,945 a year.

You have seen one side of America for over forty years. Come see the other side. I am sure we can find some motels to put everyone up in, although you may have to bunk up. Hope the attendees like fast food, because in a neighborhood where residents have spent years fighting for something as basic as a full grocery store, that is mostly what is on offer. If the Fed really wants to act in the best interests of America, come visit the America that does not appear in the resort brochures. Visit real Americans. Stop visiting the Americans who are not like us.

How we did this

Data. All income figures come from the Bureau of Economic Analysis Local Area Personal Income table CAINC4 (Personal Income and Employment by Major Component), February 2026 release, covering every U.S. county from 1969 through 2024. We used line 46 (dividends, interest, and rent), line 45 (net earnings), line 47 (personal current transfer receipts), line 10 (total personal income), and line 20 (population). Per-person figures are the county total divided by BEA's population estimate for that county and year. We verified our arithmetic against BEA's own published per capita personal income (line 30) and against the Wyoming Economic Analysis Division's 2024 report, and matched both exactly.

Inflation adjustment. All dollar figures in the racing chart and the takeaways are in 2024 dollars. We converted each year using the BLS Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U, series CUUR0000SA0, U.S. city average, all items, 1982-84=100), annual averages, pulled directly from BLS. The conversion is the standard one: each year's nominal value multiplied by the ratio of the 2024 CPI to that year's CPI. Note that inflation adjustment does not affect any within-year rankings, since the same deflator applies to every county in a given year.

The racing chart. The animation shows the top 15 counties by inflation-adjusted per-person DIR income in each year from 1969 to 2024. To keep tiny-county statistical noise off the leaderboard, the chart universe is limited to counties with at least 10,000 residents in 2024 (about 2,400 counties). A county that qualifies is shown for its full history, even in early years when its population was smaller; each bar displays that year's population so you can judge for yourself. The dollar axis is fixed at the 2024 maximum for all years, on purpose: the near-empty chart of 1969 is the point. The benchmark strip above the bars shows the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile of per-person DIR income across that same universe of counties, on the same axis. The county type groupings (resort towns, retirement coasts, metro money, energy and land, company dynasty) are our editorial classifications, not BEA categories.

What DIR is and is not. BEA's "dividends, interest, and rent" is a residence-based measure of income from current production. It includes dividend and interest income, rental income, the imputed rental value of owner-occupied homes, and imputed interest from pension and insurance funds. It excludes capital gains entirely, realized or not. Not one dollar of profit from selling stock or property appears in these figures, which is why we describe DIR as a conservative measure of income from wealth. The net worth framing in the piece (roughly $8 million to $20 million in income-producing assets per resident) is the standard flow-to-stock conversion, dividing the income by an assumed yield of 2% to 5%; it is an illustration built on a stated assumption, not a measurement.

One more honesty note. Per capita means the county total divided by everyone, including children. It is an average, and in Teton County the average is pulled up hard by a small number of very large fortunes. The typical Jackson household is not collecting $411,446 a year in investment income. The county in aggregate behaves as if every household were. That gap between the average and the typical is not a flaw in the analysis. It is the story.

The full county panel behind both charts is available on request, and every figure can be reproduced from the public BEA and BLS files named above.