KANSAS CITY, Mo. -Goldman Sachs had a good year. The investment house is giving its top employees $16 billion in bonuses.

Sixteen. Billion. Bucks. In bonuses.

The author Tom Wolfe, himself very wealthy, didn’t call Wall Street bankers “masters of the universe” for nothing.

Why, it’s enough to make the less rich – say, the half-million-a-year crowd – stew this Christmas in their Vail chalets. Or so we’re told.

“A New Class War: The Haves Vs. The Have Mores,” declares The New York Times. “Revolt of the Fairly Rich,” says Fortune magazine. And just last week, Anne Taylor Fleming, an essayist on PBS’ “NewsHour,” voiced indignation at gift catalogs selling $26,000 handbags, and she said: “I hear it all the time, people making $300,000 a year saying they are having a hard time keeping their boats afloat.”

While the rest of America rolls its eyeballs at such injustice, a spate of new studies and statistics throws a blinding spotlight on just how concentrated the world’s wealth has become. The richest of the rich are getting much richer, and ascending quicker, than are the rather wealthy.

And Average Joe? He appears stuck in the mud.

According to data recently prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households saw an increase in real household income of 2 percent between 1990 and 2004. That’s adjusted for inflation.

Two. Percent. In 14 years.

Now creep up the income ladder to the top 1 percent of households. There, says the center’s Aviva Aron-Dine, real income shot up 57 percent in the same period.

Climb higher. For the top 0.1 percent – where incomes average about $4.5 million a year – the jump was 85 percent. For the top .01 percent, 112 percent.

“The increasing gulf between the rich and super rich is a reflection of the greater chasm throughout society,” says Aron-Dine. “What’s going on is an increasingly skewed assessment of wage and income over the long term.”

Not since the 1920s – the era of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rollicking Jay Gatsby – has such a small slice of America hoarded so much of the nation’s income, her findings show.

Globally, the richest 2 percent of adults now own more than half of the personal wealth, says a new study by U.N. researchers. The bulk of the world’s valuables are not just controlled by relatively few people, but those people live in relatively few places – North America, Europe and some nations in the Asia Pacific region.

“There’s definitely a vicious cycle at work,” said New York University economist Edward N. Wolff, who studies wealth accumulation. “Once this process starts, it feeds on itself. When one industry bids up CEOs’ salaries, they all follow and the pay just keeps increasing.”

The splintering of the affluent – a demographic once loosely regarded as one – is profoundly evident in the medical industry. The spectacular lifestyles accorded to some doctors specializing in tummy tucks and facelifts lure gifted surgeons who feel they aren’t earning enough reattaching severed limbs.

Spiraling costs of medical schooling and the temptation of specialists’ pay drive doctors away from family practice or pediatrics and straight up the “E-ROAD.” That’s the fraternal acronym for emergency, radiology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology or dermatology.

“A person looking at huge medical-school debt says, “I can be a primary-care physician and make $150,000 a year, or I can invest the same amount of time and be a radiologist, making $400,000,”‘ said Perry A. Pungo, director of medical education for the Kansas City, Mo.-based American Academy of Family Physicians.

And those pay figures are peanuts to physicians such as Robert H. Glassman, who left a lucrative practice to rake in millions more managing health-care investment funds for Merrill Lynch.

In a recent Times story headlined “Very Rich are Leaving Merely Rich Behind,” Glassman, 45, spoke of being self-conscious at the 20th reunion of his Harvard class. His medical peers “remained true to their ethics … and saw that somebody else who was 10 times less smart was making much more money.”

But experts say if such disparities are, in fact, fueling “class warfare” within the well-to-do, then it is a cold war – a whispered frustration over a meritocracy out of whack.

“There are pathways to becoming rich and pathways to becoming super rich, and they don’t take the same amount of work, talent or credentials,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

Millions of millionaires

In the push for record-upon-record profits, “many high-end white-collar people are being beset by the same trends that affected blue-collar people 20 years ago. An economy that had always divided the middle from the bottom, and the middle from the top, is now differentiating the top from the upper top.”

Part of that is due to more Americans being at the top, or near it: In 2005 the number of millionaire U.S. households jumped for a third straight year to a record 8.9 million, according to the market-research firm TNS Financial Services.

But these days having a net worth or at least $1 million, not counting your home, places you in a universe light years from, say, Warren Buffett’s.

In June, the Omaha businessman’s gift of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation crystallized growing concern in philanthropic circles that donations of the ultrarich could stifle the giving of lesser benefactors who think their $50 checks – or even $10,000 checks – won’t make much difference.

“There is some of that rumbling out there,” said Laura McKnight of the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. “I do believe that there is some degree of a chilling effect … on people who give at lower levels, potentially feeling disenfranchised.”

Mixed messages

Across the income spectrum, Americans are sending mixed messages about the widening wealth gaps, according to recent opinion polls.

Almost three-quarters of those surveyed this month in a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll said the divide between rich and poor is a “serious” issue, versus 24 percent who didn’t think so.

Still, a Gallup Poll suggests the very rich remain more admired than despised: A majority of Americans agree that “people who make lots of money deserve it” and “almost anyone can get rich if they put their mind to it.”

And, in survey after survey, one of America’s uberrich – Oprah Winfrey – also is one of its most admired.

“Look, there’s always been a sense that Horatio Alger’s alive and well in America,” said economist Bernstein. “But I also think there’s a sense that fair play has been violated in the present economy …

“This idea of “You’re on your own – try making it big in this market,’ I think, has given rise to a sense that we’ve gone too far on that path,” he said.

And whether reform means prohibiting corporations from deducting executive pay, or your usual redirecting of wealth through taxation, Bernstein raises a provocative point: Who better to get policymakers’ attention than the frustrated masses earning six figures?

“It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have some effect on social change.”

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FALLING BEHIND

Here’s how real income grew between 1990 and 2004

Up 2 percent: For the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households

Up 57 percent: For the top 1 percent of households

Up 85 percent: For the top 0.1 percent of households

Up 112 percent: For the top .01 percent of households

Source: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities