Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%.
When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich.
Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. This is because those dollars that are printed go directly into bonds, equities, and assets that only a small amount of the population owns a significant amount of. When money is "printed" the Fed actually injects money into financial markets through buying assets. This asset inflation caused by money printing gives more money to the rich to buy more assets, thus driving up the prices of financial products, real estate, and all other valued assets in society. Thus, cost of living skyrockets, but only the rich are actually increasing their net worth (which is increasing exponentially). All of this happens while minimum wage, and most wages, are stagnant.
Wealth inequality and social unrest in America is DIRECTLY related to corrupt and/or incompetent (you choose) Fed policies. It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education.
"But poor people have iphones now" when people can't afford food, healthcare, or any leisure time is the 2021 equivalent of "Let them eat cake".
The balance of wealth is insulting when we have so many basic needs not being met for those at the bottom
"Stealing" is a word that gets knee jerk reactions. But the more polite way to phrase it is that the rich benefit from societal structure 1000x more than the poor and are able to acquire wealth at an accelerated pace because of these structures. Asking the wealthy to pay a greater share to improve society is perfectly reasonable. The fallacy in complaining against taxes for the rich that are already higher than their proportional of wealth is ignoring the fact that so much of taxes goes towards systems that just increase the rate of wealth accumulation. The wealthy reap the benefits of power in compounding ways.
The framing in the article is ahistorical. The post-WW2 period was a period of exceptionally _low_ inequality. If you look back to just the 1800s there were swings in inequality comparable to the present day. We're now moving back to the historical baseline.
There are some contributing factors to the shift in inequality, a major one being that labor is now oversupplied compared to the post-war period, and the competition is driving wages lower. The U.S. has much higher immigration rates now, which contributes to the oversupply of labor. The late 1800s and early 1900s had similarly high immigration and high inequality. [1]
Whether the historical baseline for inequality is the best amount of inequality is a different question though. It's clear that as redistribution flattens the income curve there is dead-weight loss as highly productive people stop wasting their time doing taxable work. It's also clear that investing in children who would otherwise be malnourished or lack education or healthcare is a net positive for society. It's not clear to me that the current level of inequality is the wrong one - we're admitting a lot of immigrants who are vastly improving their life prospects as a result, the economy is growing, and technology is amazing. Spending more money on health care would have limited benefits [2]. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether inequality should be higher or lower (it's hard to find a good-faith analysis in these terms), but the Time article uses an arbitrary timeframe and doesn't shed any light on the question.
The concept of a 'historical baseline' is nonsensical. As you extend your timeline, inequality is going to decrease because most human societies have not had the kinds of disparity we measure today. Moreover, we're not beholden to historical norms of any sort. Collective action can change things. It's happened quite a lot historically.
If you insist on a specific citation, check out Ten Thousand Years of Inequality. The editors (whose detailed reasoning I ultimately disagree with) have spent years doing papers on this subject.
A Farewell to Alms & Capital in the 21st Century give a lot of insight into this as well.
More importantly - the _low_ inequality was really only in the US. Ever since the beginning of agriculture, the world has grown steadily more unequal. It peaked in the Belle Epoch in France (leading up to WW1), and we've recently sky-rocketed past that level.
Yeah well the 1800s were also a time where people barely traveled 50kms outwards in their whole life and slaves existed so why on earth would we take that as a barometer for anything.
I think the issue with inequality that bothers many people includes an extra feature, how difficult it is for someone to move between percentiles of wealth. If it were easy to join the top 10% in wealth via intelligence, grit, and hard-work, I doubt many would be bothered by even deeper inequality than the USA currently has. However, if it is both difficult to move up the wealth ladder and highly unequal, it is a recipe for social unrest.
One of the things that ruffles my feathers about this genre of made-for-mass-consumption clap-trap is this sort of proclamation:
> Other nations are suffering less from COVID-19 because they made better choices
Which other nations? As someone who regularly reads francophone european news, I can assure you it isn't any nation in Europe. OP goes on to cite minimum wage, overtime pay, state-funded healthcare/childcare/education, and more powerful unions as choices Americans could make to improve their economic standing.
But broader economic outcomes such as wealth inequality in Europe has followed a similar trajectory to that of the US over the past 40 years, and since the start of the COVID crisis, civil liberties have been decimated by the technocracy's crisis response, medical outcomes even with their much-vaunted state healthcare systems are not significantly better than in the US, and small businesses are failing and people are falling into poverty at astounding rates. The ECB prints euros in lock-step with the Fed's dollars.
My intent isn't to make an argument for or against Euro-style social security features, but merely to remind that even with those features, Europe is not presently faring better than the US. Arguably coronavirus-related economic and social outcomes (medical outcomes notwithstanding, depending on the nation/state) in Europe are even more onerous than in the US at present.
Furthermore, this whole episode could sweep far-right parties into power in Europe. It's essentially a given, for example, that Marine Le Pen will run against Macron again in 2022, and not at all certain that she will lose…
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. If I take two lines of code and put them together, I've created something of value that I might be able to sell.
Wealth is created all the time out of thin air. It might take the form of an innovative new technology, open source code, or even art. It might be because you bought raw materials and built a house, and the subsequent value of the house is greater than the costs that went into it.
Scale that up, and you can create vast amounts of wealth without ever taking it from anyone else. The local coffee shop didn't steal $5 (well, $10, but who's counting) from my wallet; I pay it willingly.
This very common idea that if one person has wealth then they must have taken it from someone else is simply not true.
There are just as many fair and honorable ways (perhaps more) to make wealth as there are the opposite.
The issue is the distribution of the wealth. Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much. So then why is a disproportionate amount of wealth given to people who are not the movers and shakers? Society doesn’t cease to be pump blood when leeches are peeled off.
I half agree with this. It is about scaling, scaling exploitation of workers. You think Bezos actually made his money fairly? Or does it matter to anyone since the winners just pull wool over everyones eyes?
How this privileged viewpoint came to prevail is most likely from decades of brainwash. Wealth has power to keep that message strong and alive.
This keeps coming up in almost every thread because of so many blinded by acquiring capital. The Myth of the Temporarily Embarassed Millionaire. Shine on
This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc.
If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more money you start with the more money gets concentrated around you.
For example, I could leverage my current house to purchase a rental property in my city and rent it at a profit. Over time I'd pay down my loans and the value of my two homes would increase. I could then leverage two properties to purchase more or larger rental properties. My wealth would increase because I had sufficient wealth to begin with.
Ah yes, the famous cabal of 1 percenters sitting around and committing grand larceny as they raid the bank accounts of poor people. At least that's what this headline would have you believe.
The reality is much more boring. Thanks to "math," they've determined that if the ratio of incomes from 1945-1974 held steady, the bottom 90% would have "more" than they do now. Of course the bottom 90% itself is a fantasy and you can find yourself in or out of it many times in the course of a career.
But is it possible that maybe, just maybe, wealth distribution isn't a 0 sum game? And maybe being in the bottom 90% is better now than it was 40 years ago, because of, I don't know, iPhones, next-day delivery for anything you want, telehealth, instant access to the world's information, electric cars, and many other things that 1 percenters have made for us?
It's of little consolation having the price of your phone decline when the price of education, healthcare and a roof over your head have skyrocketed.
Even if that were not the case, it's abundantly clear that geometrically increasing consolidated economic power is being translated into consolidated raw political power (which is zero sum). The events of the last few months and history in general have proved that this is very, very dangerous.
We couldn't play flappy birds on a mini computer in our pockets in 1970, though, so I guess that makes all that r>g and compound interest accumulating in 0.1% pockets worthwhile.
> and many other things that 1 percenters have made for us?
Jesus christ, this has to be satire. The people "making" these things are not in the 1 percent. We don't have to look up to the elites in gratitude because they deigned to give us their magical gifts.
Wealth is obviously not a zero sum game. And of course the comforts of even the poorest have increased over the past half century.
But don't discount out of hand the concern that the relative distribution is a problem. Money, and especially money that is capital, almost algorithmically and naturally captures more money.
The trend line then becomes one where more and more wealth is concentrated at the top, even if the total amount of wealth increases.
Wealth, at some level, is the ability to direct labor. As wealth becomes more concentrated, you have fewer people organizing the world's labor power. It becomes harder for the poorest to engage in self determination.
Let's get something out of the way, it's not the 1 percenters that make things for us, it's the engineers, the programmers, the developers, the physicists, the biologists, the chemists, the grad students and every other poor soul grinding for progress on a computer screen in exchange for basic decency.
Why is it that nearly every company that puts first the shareholders ends up pooping the bed? Because the shareholders don't know jack except what the other people in the 1% want.
>But is it possible that maybe, just maybe, wealth distribution isn't a 0 sum game? And maybe being in the bottom 90% is better now than it was 40 years ago, because of, I don't know, iPhones
Telling homeless people that they are better off than the middle-class 40 years ago because they have a smartphone is basically the 21st century equivalent of "Let them eat cake".
The problem of inequality in general needs to be framed as one of power asymmetry. There are a handful of people that have managed to garner, through their wealth, similar power to states with millions of people. The solutions to this involve either making money less able to purchase power, or taking some of this money away. I suspect the latter is more likely to happen but I'll happily support either method.
In my lifetime some sort of switch has flipped, where the people advocating for more taxes no longer do so with an explicit intention to pay for something greater or something new, but simply on the assumption that the act of taxing people will inherently make them more equal. Is there a coherent philosophical basis for this train of thought? Is there any historical precedent that increased taxes is what we need to become equal?
The top 1% changes a lot. Most people don't stay in the top 1% for many years in a row. Many people below the 90th percentile benefit from the growth of the top levels when they have their brief time in the top 1%.
In Venezuela the rich were never destroyed, I'd argue that Chavez and his supporters rose into a new class of elites. They control the oil company, drug smuggling, etc. I'd argue that wealth as a zero sum game is a part of the premise - there is the whole pie (economy) and then there are slices (who reaps the benefits).
By growing the size of the pie you grow the economy, but then the task becomes dividing the pie reasonably to ensure stability and reduce societal problems. In Venezuela, the economy is shafted for numerous reasons - huge concentration of the whole pie into a small elite does no good for the rest of the country, and was worsened by sanctions punishing these actions.
But if there's an alternative tax/regulation structure that can make distribution more equitable without affecting production too much, then the game can be zero sum, or close to zero sum.
We don't have to choose between America and Venezuela. That's a false dichotomy.
Some wealth is not zero-sum. But a lot of wealth is resource based which is by definition zero-sum.
But that aside: the top 1% got their by exploiting the surplus value of the 99% regardless of whether wealth was being created or moved, it definitely wasn’t that 1% creating or moving it.
I don't get this obsession with the movement or whatever that gets behind these articles.
6% of the worlds population of (Aus, NZ, Canada, UK, US) owns over 50% of its wealth. The argument is always about why a fraction of that 6% that takes money from whats remaining of that 6%.
The actual problem is not really anywhere near the fractions of that 6% that grabs headlines. I would also look at anyone who is in that 6% complain about wealth inequality with a confused look on my face. It is such a divisive topic that can get anyone riled up and it completely misses reality.
Zero-sum thinking perceives situations as zero-sum games, where one person's gain would be another's loss. The term is derived from game theory. However, unlike the game theory concept, zero-sum thinking refers to a psychological construct—a person's subjective interpretation of a situation. Zero-sum thinking is captured by the saying "your gain is my loss" (or conversely, "your loss is my gain"). Rozycka-Tran et al. (2015) defined zero-sum thinking as:
> A general belief system about the antagonistic nature of social relations, shared by people in a society or culture and based on the implicit assumption that a finite amount of goods exists in the world, in which one person's winning makes others the losers, and vice versa ... a relatively permanent and general conviction that social relations are like a zero-sum game. People who share this conviction believe that success, especially economic success, is possible only at the expense of other people's failures.
Zero-sum bias is a cognitive bias towards zero-sum thinking; it is people's tendency to intuitively judge that a situation is zero-sum, even when this is not the case. This bias promotes zero-sum fallacies, false beliefs that situations are zero-sum. Such fallacies can cause other false judgements and poor decisions. In economics, "zero-sum fallacy" generally refers to the fixed-pie fallacy.
No doubt the rich have been getting richer, at the expense of the rest of society, and this is getting worse as they accrue ever more power to control the government decisions that really count.
But you can't really calculate this transfer of wealth in the way they do it in this article. You can't simply change one parameter and pretend that the only thing that would have happened is that wages would be radically higher, for example.
Radically higher wages would have numerous effects. Many companies wouldn't have been able to remain profitable. Other would have been more profitable because they would have more customers. It's impossible to say exactly what the net effect would be.
Inequality seems to be a completely pointless buzzword to me. The only thing that matters is if there are more or less poor people, and how poor are those people compared to similar percentiles in the past.
It shouldn't matter how rich the richest people on earth are. I really love seeing people on the Internet try to convince themselves that because Bezos or Musk are worth $100B, they must be stealing it from poor people.
>The only thing that matters is if there are more or less poor people, and how poor are those people compared to similar percentiles in the past.
People who are beating the drum about inequality are arguing this; isn't this what the elephant chart shows? For the American middle and working class they are as poor, if not poorer than their contemporaries in the 60s.
The plain argument is that productivity growth has exploded since the 70s, but wage growth has stagnated. People are producing more but being paid less; that might not be outright theft but I think people are beginning to understand that something isn't right.
Poverty is not the only metric we should care about when it comes to inequality. For instance there's also financial resilience, what percentage of people will be strongly affected if they suffer an adverse event i.e. a surprise medical bill or an appliance breaking. Another one is the distribution of wealth between people that spend most of their income vs income that is held in investment accounts or savings. Having sufficient spending is essential to a healthy economy.
A third, though this is much more an ideological standpoint and I don't expect everyone to agree with it, is the marginal value of money. If an increase in income has a greater marginal effect on the health/wellbeing/happiness of people who have less of it, isn't it better to prioritize growing their incomes rather than people who already have their entire hierarchy of needs met?
If Bezos continues paying people at minimum wage, hires union busting lawyers, and hires more lawyers to actively lobby to keep minimum wage low for 20+ years while he makes more money. Is he stealing from poor people or is that just people on the Internet trying to convince themselves he is stealing from poor people?
I think this would be a valid argument if significant money wouldn't also come with significant power in the modern day and age. As soon as there is significant wealth inequality, there is also a significant power inequality, with a small number of people determining the fate of the rest of the world. Surely this isn't good?
> The only thing that matters is if there are more or less poor people
Up to a point I definitely agree with this, but the issue with some people being billionaires is not that they can drive around in Cadillacs made of gold, it's that they can and do control government policies, and use that power to the detriment of common people.
> Adjusted for inflation using the CPI, the numbers are even worse: half of all full-time workers (those at or below the median income of $50,000 a year) now earn less than half what they would have had incomes across the distribution continued to keep pace with economic growth.
Another aspect is the power that comes with money. People aren’t focusing on inequality in a pure “that’s unfair” view, there are also issues on how these ultra-rich people are completely outside of the reach of most rules and can sway whole economies basically at will.
Bezos’ fortune is equivalent to whole PIBs, that’s a lot of power concentrated in a single man.
But isn't wealth to a large degree relative? Like, if I'm richer than I value my time higher, meaning it's more expensive to buy my time (human services). Same with other resources such as land, gold or bitcoin. There's only so much of it thus the value rises.
Of course the world can become more productive and thus make everyone (in average) more "wealthy", but only for certain things.
People read this article and love to bitch, but what is the solution?
Flat tax? Raise income taxes ? Inheritance tax?
The fact of the matter is poverty is really what is sad an unacceptable. People you should access to free health care and their basic needs met if they cant meet them, but I do not see what is fundamentally wrong with Bill Gates earning 100000X more than someone that is making a good living wage, with healthcare, and a 401K in SV.
If anyone is interested, this book has some interesting ideas on how to tackle the current disaster:
My unpopular opinion is that as long as everyone has a universal basic quality of life and isn't living paycheck to paycheck, then wealth inequality is not bad. What's bad right now is that we have some people who wouldn't bother picking up Benjamins and other people who are scrounging the streets for pennies and leftovers. That sort of inequality is baffling. At the same time, there are some folks who could be given a winning lottery ticket and be homeless the next month.
I think of UBI and wonder about all of the people who do not know how to spend their money properly, and if they'll just end up homeless anyway. Maybe UBI is not the answer, but UBS -- universal basic services. UBI is the wrong metric. The best metric is how many people are living in unfathomable poverty. I bet that UBI will not be able to solve homelessness in and of itself.
How is this different from any random conspiracy theory? The term "counterfactual" is used instead of "I made a strawman?"
Edit: the reliance on "taxable income" instead of gross is interesting. Wouldn't a progressive tax policy look similar to the paper's stats since more income would be taxable for folks with lower income?
> the reliance on "taxable income" instead of gross is interesting
Taxable income is gross income when you're pulling a wage. Even in a progressive tax system where, for example, your first $10,000 untaxed, it's still taxable income because even if you make $12,000 then the full amount is used to determine your tax bill.
> Wouldn't a progressive tax policy look similar to the paper's stats since more income would be taxable for folks with lower income?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. Be specific.
This is a huge collection of charted data which shows that there may indeed be something going on that is a little harder to explain away than the average conspiracy theory.
The study of how wealth accumulates to capital holders has been reinvigorated by Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".
What exactly have "the rich" done to "take from the bottom"?
Let's say "the rich" would have done nothing.
Would Ford's Factories in Detroit still exist, churning out the same cars they built in the 60s, only employing more people doing so?
I don't think so. To keep "the bottom" employed at the same level as in the past, somebody had to create new industries and businesses. Why is it the responsibility of the 1% to somehow magically do that?
[+] [-] natenthe|5 years ago|reply
When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich.
Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. This is because those dollars that are printed go directly into bonds, equities, and assets that only a small amount of the population owns a significant amount of. When money is "printed" the Fed actually injects money into financial markets through buying assets. This asset inflation caused by money printing gives more money to the rich to buy more assets, thus driving up the prices of financial products, real estate, and all other valued assets in society. Thus, cost of living skyrockets, but only the rich are actually increasing their net worth (which is increasing exponentially). All of this happens while minimum wage, and most wages, are stagnant.
Wealth inequality and social unrest in America is DIRECTLY related to corrupt and/or incompetent (you choose) Fed policies. It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education.
[+] [-] klmadfejno|5 years ago|reply
The balance of wealth is insulting when we have so many basic needs not being met for those at the bottom
"Stealing" is a word that gets knee jerk reactions. But the more polite way to phrase it is that the rich benefit from societal structure 1000x more than the poor and are able to acquire wealth at an accelerated pace because of these structures. Asking the wealthy to pay a greater share to improve society is perfectly reasonable. The fallacy in complaining against taxes for the rich that are already higher than their proportional of wealth is ignoring the fact that so much of taxes goes towards systems that just increase the rate of wealth accumulation. The wealthy reap the benefits of power in compounding ways.
[+] [-] salmonellaeater|5 years ago|reply
There are some contributing factors to the shift in inequality, a major one being that labor is now oversupplied compared to the post-war period, and the competition is driving wages lower. The U.S. has much higher immigration rates now, which contributes to the oversupply of labor. The late 1800s and early 1900s had similarly high immigration and high inequality. [1]
Whether the historical baseline for inequality is the best amount of inequality is a different question though. It's clear that as redistribution flattens the income curve there is dead-weight loss as highly productive people stop wasting their time doing taxable work. It's also clear that investing in children who would otherwise be malnourished or lack education or healthcare is a net positive for society. It's not clear to me that the current level of inequality is the wrong one - we're admitting a lot of immigrants who are vastly improving their life prospects as a result, the economy is growing, and technology is amazing. Spending more money on health care would have limited benefits [2]. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether inequality should be higher or lower (it's hard to find a good-faith analysis in these terms), but the Time article uses an arbitrary timeframe and doesn't shed any light on the question.
[1] See Ages of Discord for a much more detailed dive into this. http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/
[2] Robin Hanson gives an argument with lots of evidence here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-med...
[+] [-] AlotOfReading|5 years ago|reply
If you insist on a specific citation, check out Ten Thousand Years of Inequality. The editors (whose detailed reasoning I ultimately disagree with) have spent years doing papers on this subject.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|5 years ago|reply
More importantly - the _low_ inequality was really only in the US. Ever since the beginning of agriculture, the world has grown steadily more unequal. It peaked in the Belle Epoch in France (leading up to WW1), and we've recently sky-rocketed past that level.
[+] [-] stefan_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazerpants|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ummonk|5 years ago|reply
I'm not sure what you mean that "the framing in the article is ahistorical". Such framings were common throughout history.
[+] [-] coolreader18|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bvanderveen|5 years ago|reply
> Other nations are suffering less from COVID-19 because they made better choices
Which other nations? As someone who regularly reads francophone european news, I can assure you it isn't any nation in Europe. OP goes on to cite minimum wage, overtime pay, state-funded healthcare/childcare/education, and more powerful unions as choices Americans could make to improve their economic standing.
But broader economic outcomes such as wealth inequality in Europe has followed a similar trajectory to that of the US over the past 40 years, and since the start of the COVID crisis, civil liberties have been decimated by the technocracy's crisis response, medical outcomes even with their much-vaunted state healthcare systems are not significantly better than in the US, and small businesses are failing and people are falling into poverty at astounding rates. The ECB prints euros in lock-step with the Fed's dollars.
My intent isn't to make an argument for or against Euro-style social security features, but merely to remind that even with those features, Europe is not presently faring better than the US. Arguably coronavirus-related economic and social outcomes (medical outcomes notwithstanding, depending on the nation/state) in Europe are even more onerous than in the US at present.
Furthermore, this whole episode could sweep far-right parties into power in Europe. It's essentially a given, for example, that Marine Le Pen will run against Macron again in 2022, and not at all certain that she will lose…
[+] [-] skynet-9000|5 years ago|reply
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. If I take two lines of code and put them together, I've created something of value that I might be able to sell.
Wealth is created all the time out of thin air. It might take the form of an innovative new technology, open source code, or even art. It might be because you bought raw materials and built a house, and the subsequent value of the house is greater than the costs that went into it.
Scale that up, and you can create vast amounts of wealth without ever taking it from anyone else. The local coffee shop didn't steal $5 (well, $10, but who's counting) from my wallet; I pay it willingly.
This very common idea that if one person has wealth then they must have taken it from someone else is simply not true.
There are just as many fair and honorable ways (perhaps more) to make wealth as there are the opposite.
[+] [-] willis936|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juanani|5 years ago|reply
How this privileged viewpoint came to prevail is most likely from decades of brainwash. Wealth has power to keep that message strong and alive.
This keeps coming up in almost every thread because of so many blinded by acquiring capital. The Myth of the Temporarily Embarassed Millionaire. Shine on
[+] [-] Pfhreak|5 years ago|reply
If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more money you start with the more money gets concentrated around you.
For example, I could leverage my current house to purchase a rental property in my city and rent it at a profit. Over time I'd pay down my loans and the value of my two homes would increase. I could then leverage two properties to purchase more or larger rental properties. My wealth would increase because I had sufficient wealth to begin with.
[+] [-] bmmayer1|5 years ago|reply
The reality is much more boring. Thanks to "math," they've determined that if the ratio of incomes from 1945-1974 held steady, the bottom 90% would have "more" than they do now. Of course the bottom 90% itself is a fantasy and you can find yourself in or out of it many times in the course of a career.
But is it possible that maybe, just maybe, wealth distribution isn't a 0 sum game? And maybe being in the bottom 90% is better now than it was 40 years ago, because of, I don't know, iPhones, next-day delivery for anything you want, telehealth, instant access to the world's information, electric cars, and many other things that 1 percenters have made for us?
[+] [-] pydry|5 years ago|reply
Even if that were not the case, it's abundantly clear that geometrically increasing consolidated economic power is being translated into consolidated raw political power (which is zero sum). The events of the last few months and history in general have proved that this is very, very dangerous.
We couldn't play flappy birds on a mini computer in our pockets in 1970, though, so I guess that makes all that r>g and compound interest accumulating in 0.1% pockets worthwhile.
[+] [-] machello13|5 years ago|reply
Jesus christ, this has to be satire. The people "making" these things are not in the 1 percent. We don't have to look up to the elites in gratitude because they deigned to give us their magical gifts.
[+] [-] Pfhreak|5 years ago|reply
But don't discount out of hand the concern that the relative distribution is a problem. Money, and especially money that is capital, almost algorithmically and naturally captures more money.
The trend line then becomes one where more and more wealth is concentrated at the top, even if the total amount of wealth increases.
Wealth, at some level, is the ability to direct labor. As wealth becomes more concentrated, you have fewer people organizing the world's labor power. It becomes harder for the poorest to engage in self determination.
[+] [-] PartiallyTyped|5 years ago|reply
Why is it that nearly every company that puts first the shareholders ends up pooping the bed? Because the shareholders don't know jack except what the other people in the 1% want.
[+] [-] RIMR|5 years ago|reply
Telling homeless people that they are better off than the middle-class 40 years ago because they have a smartphone is basically the 21st century equivalent of "Let them eat cake".
[+] [-] brandonr49|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tengbretson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousiam|5 years ago|reply
This premise has been the basis for many political uprisings (e.g. Venezuela) where wealth has been destroyed instead of created.
[+] [-] nexthash|5 years ago|reply
By growing the size of the pie you grow the economy, but then the task becomes dividing the pie reasonably to ensure stability and reduce societal problems. In Venezuela, the economy is shafted for numerous reasons - huge concentration of the whole pie into a small elite does no good for the rest of the country, and was worsened by sanctions punishing these actions.
[+] [-] kar5pt|5 years ago|reply
We don't have to choose between America and Venezuela. That's a false dichotomy.
[+] [-] onethought|5 years ago|reply
But that aside: the top 1% got their by exploiting the surplus value of the 99% regardless of whether wealth was being created or moved, it definitely wasn’t that 1% creating or moving it.
[+] [-] _xnmw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omosubi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neximo64|5 years ago|reply
6% of the worlds population of (Aus, NZ, Canada, UK, US) owns over 50% of its wealth. The argument is always about why a fraction of that 6% that takes money from whats remaining of that 6%.
The actual problem is not really anywhere near the fractions of that 6% that grabs headlines. I would also look at anyone who is in that 6% complain about wealth inequality with a confused look on my face. It is such a divisive topic that can get anyone riled up and it completely misses reality.
[+] [-] jpn|5 years ago|reply
> A general belief system about the antagonistic nature of social relations, shared by people in a society or culture and based on the implicit assumption that a finite amount of goods exists in the world, in which one person's winning makes others the losers, and vice versa ... a relatively permanent and general conviction that social relations are like a zero-sum game. People who share this conviction believe that success, especially economic success, is possible only at the expense of other people's failures.
Zero-sum bias is a cognitive bias towards zero-sum thinking; it is people's tendency to intuitively judge that a situation is zero-sum, even when this is not the case. This bias promotes zero-sum fallacies, false beliefs that situations are zero-sum. Such fallacies can cause other false judgements and poor decisions. In economics, "zero-sum fallacy" generally refers to the fixed-pie fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_thinking
[+] [-] Grustaf|5 years ago|reply
But you can't really calculate this transfer of wealth in the way they do it in this article. You can't simply change one parameter and pretend that the only thing that would have happened is that wages would be radically higher, for example.
Radically higher wages would have numerous effects. Many companies wouldn't have been able to remain profitable. Other would have been more profitable because they would have more customers. It's impossible to say exactly what the net effect would be.
[+] [-] h3rsko|5 years ago|reply
It shouldn't matter how rich the richest people on earth are. I really love seeing people on the Internet try to convince themselves that because Bezos or Musk are worth $100B, they must be stealing it from poor people.
[+] [-] nemothekid|5 years ago|reply
People who are beating the drum about inequality are arguing this; isn't this what the elephant chart shows? For the American middle and working class they are as poor, if not poorer than their contemporaries in the 60s.
The plain argument is that productivity growth has exploded since the 70s, but wage growth has stagnated. People are producing more but being paid less; that might not be outright theft but I think people are beginning to understand that something isn't right.
[+] [-] Tarq0n|5 years ago|reply
A third, though this is much more an ideological standpoint and I don't expect everyone to agree with it, is the marginal value of money. If an increase in income has a greater marginal effect on the health/wellbeing/happiness of people who have less of it, isn't it better to prioritize growing their incomes rather than people who already have their entire hierarchy of needs met?
[+] [-] yepthatsreality|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b3kart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehjoker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuriko_boyko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grustaf|5 years ago|reply
Up to a point I definitely agree with this, but the issue with some people being billionaires is not that they can drive around in Cadillacs made of gold, it's that they can and do control government policies, and use that power to the detriment of common people.
[+] [-] hrktb|5 years ago|reply
> Adjusted for inflation using the CPI, the numbers are even worse: half of all full-time workers (those at or below the median income of $50,000 a year) now earn less than half what they would have had incomes across the distribution continued to keep pace with economic growth.
Another aspect is the power that comes with money. People aren’t focusing on inequality in a pure “that’s unfair” view, there are also issues on how these ultra-rich people are completely outside of the reach of most rules and can sway whole economies basically at will.
Bezos’ fortune is equivalent to whole PIBs, that’s a lot of power concentrated in a single man.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cjblomqvist|5 years ago|reply
Of course the world can become more productive and thus make everyone (in average) more "wealthy", but only for certain things.
[+] [-] misiti3780|5 years ago|reply
Flat tax? Raise income taxes ? Inheritance tax?
The fact of the matter is poverty is really what is sad an unacceptable. People you should access to free health care and their basic needs met if they cant meet them, but I do not see what is fundamentally wrong with Bill Gates earning 100000X more than someone that is making a good living wage, with healthcare, and a 401K in SV.
If anyone is interested, this book has some interesting ideas on how to tackle the current disaster:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XRTTHL3/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
[+] [-] anonytrary|5 years ago|reply
I think of UBI and wonder about all of the people who do not know how to spend their money properly, and if they'll just end up homeless anyway. Maybe UBI is not the answer, but UBS -- universal basic services. UBI is the wrong metric. The best metric is how many people are living in unfathomable poverty. I bet that UBI will not be able to solve homelessness in and of itself.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] adolph|5 years ago|reply
Edit: the reliance on "taxable income" instead of gross is interesting. Wouldn't a progressive tax policy look similar to the paper's stats since more income would be taxable for folks with lower income?
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
[+] [-] mdoms|5 years ago|reply
Taxable income is gross income when you're pulling a wage. Even in a progressive tax system where, for example, your first $10,000 untaxed, it's still taxable income because even if you make $12,000 then the full amount is used to determine your tax bill.
> Wouldn't a progressive tax policy look similar to the paper's stats since more income would be taxable for folks with lower income?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. Be specific.
[+] [-] 0xfaded|5 years ago|reply
This is a huge collection of charted data which shows that there may indeed be something going on that is a little harder to explain away than the average conspiracy theory.
The study of how wealth accumulates to capital holders has been reinvigorated by Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century".
Since then, a huge amount of research has been done on the driving forces behind wealth inequality. Skimming the surface, I'll throw out https://angrynomics.com/ and https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rentier-Capitalism-Owns-Economy-Pay....
[+] [-] cryptocrypter|5 years ago|reply
What exactly have "the rich" done to "take from the bottom"?
Let's say "the rich" would have done nothing.
Would Ford's Factories in Detroit still exist, churning out the same cars they built in the 60s, only employing more people doing so?
I don't think so. To keep "the bottom" employed at the same level as in the past, somebody had to create new industries and businesses. Why is it the responsibility of the 1% to somehow magically do that?