In the “Hunger Games” franchise of movies and young-adult novels, political power is concentrated within the Capitol; citizens there revel in pageantry and pomp while their fellow Americans suffer from the dire, impoverishing consequences of the government’s policies. That same sort of sedimentation of power and money into the nation’s capital is happening in the current-day United States.

Measured by median household income, Loudoun County, Va. — a trendy suburb of Washington, D.C. — is the most affluent county in the nation, rocketing past the hot zone of technological innovation in California’s Santa Clara County. Seven of the nation’s ten most affluent counties surround America’s real-life “Capitol District.”