But the dirty secret behind this myth is that, while access to equities is widespread, ownership is becoming more concentrated. Two decades ago, the wealthiest 10 per cent of Americans held 77 per cent of corporate equities and mutual funds, according to calculations by Lyn Alden, a strategist. The poorest 50 per cent held just 1 per cent, leaving the middle-to-upper cohort with 12 per cent.
Today, however, the wealthiest 10 per cent own 92.5 per cent of the market — a “record high concentration”, Alden notes. And while the richest 1 per cent owned just 40 per cent two decades ago, their share stood at 54 per cent in the most recent data from 2022.
Essentially this was all the top 1% and the rest of the 10%ers barely budged in ownership percent. I'd be curious to see the results for top 0.1% and 0.01% as well.
It looks like the top 0.1% barely nudged in the past two decades as well. I would guess that the top 0.1% is probably hard to account for given all the ways the wealthiest can distribute their wealth to make it opaque and hard to granularly track. Those numbers could reflect changes in choices of financial vehicles for the wealthiest households.
Can some smart person here help me understand what this means in terms of average holding value per household? Like how much stock market wealth does the average household own? What's the average amount of stock market wealth held by the first, second, third and fourth quadrille?
If 93% of stock market wealth help by the wealthiest 10% represents $10k, that means something really different than if it represents $1m. Comparing percentages can be really confusing, particularly when talking about wealth.
> If 93% of stock market wealth help by the wealthiest 10% represents $10k,
Assuming Us has round 300k population.
My understanding: lets say whole market is worth 1Gz, i.e. sum(share*sharePirce) over (all shares in all companies) is 1 gadzilion, so 10% of population (30k) combined own 0.93 gadzilion. While the rest (270k), share 0.07 Gz of market.
on avg per person
0.93/30=0.031Gz
0.07/270=0.00025Gz
(On average, poorer 9 deciles are poorer by a factor of two)
I understand those figures don't include 401k, pensions etc, only stocks and funds hold directly by the households. If you include those, plus real estate, plus accrued Social Security rights, plus Medicare rights, plus inheritance rights etc, the real wealth distribution is a lot more equal.
I can't find any problems with the data, but this is extremely unintuitive! My father who was buying shares decades ago for his personal account had $50 commission fees (not inflation adjusted!!) And like most brokers in that time demanded, he could only buy in 'lots' meaning 100 shares minimum or multiples of that. You had to place a call to your broker, usually when the market was open, which meant the middle of the work day.
Today, practically everyone including fastfood workers has access to 401ks which are extremely cheap. No commission fees upfront. Almost every broker has commission free trading. Not only can you buy 1 share at a time, you can buy fractions of 1 share. You can do it all from your phone, after or before market hours.
Access has been expanded and costs lowered dramatically. So why have the bottom 90% stopped buying shares?
According to the US census, the bottom quartile of earners made more money in 2022, adjusted for an inflation, than any previous year in American history.
I wanted to link to this since it's the primary source but the amount of paywall forced me to pull this Axios summary instead. Thanks for posting the archive.
the ultra wealthy put all their assets into trusts or charities that dodge taxes and don't require selling anything. They can then take out loans using those assets as collateral when they need cash
Are they allowed to take out loans without paying them back? If they have to pay them back, eventually they have to use that collateral which will be a taxable event. They might be able to delay, but they'll eventually have to pay.
"Buy, Borrow, Die" is the talking point. Cost basis of the assets gets stepped up at death so the inheritor can pay off the loans at that point in time without paying taxes on capital gains.
Then this seems to be the loophole that needs to be resolved. Before the estate pays out, the debts should be settled within the estate using the cost basis belong to the deceased. Assets paid out after loans are satisfied should then have their cost basis reset (if that happens at all, I don't want to take a stance either way if that should happen, except it should only apply once loans are repaid if it ever does apply).
Mechanically, I don't think that works. What prevents the debt from attaching to the inheritor before death (e.g., co-signed loan)? The only solution here is eliminating the cost basis step-up at death.
Could they not make sure that enough of their assets are in cash-flowing assets (think, rent-yielding assets, or treasuries, or dividend-yielding stock, etc.) that need not be sold and whose cash-flow can be utilized?
Who cares of they do or don't have to pay taxes. Taxes shouldn't be punishment. We should strive to all pay less. The government wastes our money frivolously. We should be advocating for better appropriation and spending, not advocating to give them more just because you think the rich are an enemy.
Having people be this rich is a problem, though: periods of time where the wealth is superconcentrated have never been good for anyone, the economy slows down, because the superrich never consume in proportion with what they have, there is social unrest and eventually wars and revolutions. The times where wealth was less unequally distributed were the '50s and '60s, whereas we haven't seen this kind of inequality since 1914, and we all know what happened in the following 3 decades...
If the rich are not consuming in proportion to what they have, then what do they do with their money? Right, they invest it. And what does that investment create? Jobs, factories, lower costs, and new opportunities for all. The fact that someone was able to accumulate wealth shows that they know how to use it to generate a return. For the economy in general, it is much more beneficial to have people with skin in the game to invest their own money, instead of the government wasting it in bureaucracy.
Some people want wealth redistribution. Taxes are the only real mechanism for doing that. I understand that you disagree with that objective. But the proposed mechanism isn't the problem.
Wealth redistribution via progressive taxation has been a primary way of avoiding peasant revolts for awhile (working in favor of the rich who tend to be targeted during those things). Sort of like how property taxes discourage buying and holding property without using it productively.
But yes, government should use our tax money better, and even if they are used as a debtor of last resort, they should use the money they borrow more wisely as well (less relevant now that interest rates are high).
Almost all articles of the form "X% of the Y is held by the top Z%" where X > Z leave off one important thing: what % of Y should be held by the top Z%?
One's first though might be that in a truly equitable society, we'd have X = Z for all Z. E.g., the top 10% have 10% of Y, the top 20% have 20% of Y, and so on.
But upon a few moments more thought one will realize that is only mathematically possible if everyone has the same amount. If Y is stock owned by households, for example, such equitability in ownership can only happen if every household has the same amount of stock.
The moment even a single household ends up with either more or less stock than a single other household, then the % held by the top Z% will be >Z%.
This is true for anything, not just financial things. E.g., the top 10% of the winners of the Best Album of the Year Grammy Award have won more than 10% of the Best Album Grammy Awards. The top 10% of pimps manage more than 10% of the whores who work for pimps. The top 10% of pizza sellers by sales sell more than 10% of all pizza sold. The top 10% of muggers are responsible for more than 10% of muggings.
I can't help but think of all the media organs, the WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, Economist, CNBC, Fox Business, et al who cater to this small segment of the population. It must be incredibly alienating to see all this attention paid to well off people when you're on the outside.
> I can't help but think of all the media organs, the WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, Economist, CNBC, Fox Business, et al who cater to this small segment of the population.
I never thought about how small their audience actually is.
That said, I never felt a sense of alienation reading these articles/watching these shows, it really just feels like listening to someone out of touch with reality. I am mostly curious why anyone would bother watching/subscribing to this media, since the amount of information you gain from them is enough to influence you emotionally, but not enough information to gain you a market advantage.
I mean wouldn't you be better off just paying someone to manage your wealth for you or owning shares of a mutual fund? It's like these programs are for people with enough wealth to care about the market, but not enough knowledge to invest it effectively. People who are going to be picking stocks successfully are reading 10-Ks and crunching numbers in excel, not listening to Squawk Box.
> ... I am mostly curious why anyone would bother watching/subscribing to this media, since the amount of information you gain from them is enough to influence you emotionally, but not enough information to gain you a market advantage.
That's the point. They want their audience to be confused. They want them to act on instinct, to spend funds as they choose. It's not about value, it's not about growth - it's about power, first and foremost.
...So can we please stop talking about measures that improve the stock market like they're meaningfully helping average Americans, rather than the very wealthy?
Anyone with a 401k is helped by the stock market trending up. The ultra wealthy make a lot, but it raises up all those retirement accounts too. Without the power of compounding in those retirement accounts the average American would be screwed.
The average American already is skewed. The average 401k is only $129k while the median is a much lower $33k. [1] That’s not even 2 years of rent in most places (and isn’t a lot of money by any definition considering the amount needed for retirement)
That is more of an issue with education around money than anything. Access to investing is more available to the average person than at any point in human history. And if not a 401k, because the employer doesn’t offer one, something else, like a Roth IRA can be used in its place.
The information is more available than ever as well, however, there are a lot of people pushing out bad information to line their own pockets, or because they just don’t know better themselves. Sorting through the BS to get to something good can be hard, and can take more work than most people are willing to do. This is rather unfortunate, as a few really basic things can put someone far ahead of the average.
I don’t think we should cripple the best option for average people, just because not everyone is using it to its full advantage. We should be looking for ways to get more people to take advantage of compounding. It’s available today and it works. Putting retirement in the hopes of a complete overhaul of society doesn’t seem like a great bet.
I wonder to what extent the distribution is influenced by the significant number of people that plow their savings into paying down their mortgage even when it makes no financial sense (e.g. their mortgage interest rate is 3%). I know many people that do this and don't have any stock market investments beyond their retirement account.
People at different percentiles of net worth do not have the same asset distribution.
It does make financial sense for many though, because risk exists. In a big downturn would you rather be laid off with a paid-for house or laid off with a mortgage and a bunch of stocks that just plummeted in value?
I would much rather prefer the latter actually because the risk is lower. People tend to seriously discount the risk of non-liquidity in these situations, which is the scenario the former sets up. I know multiple people that discovered this the hard way. Houses without mortgages aren't anywhere close to free to live in and they can have very little liquidity in a big downturn.
He's the biggest private farmland owner, at 270,000 acres. The largest private landowner (from a google search, I didn't vet much) is the Emmerson family with 2.411 acres.
Farmland-wise, he owns a drop in the bucket- there's an estimated 900 million total farm acres.
*Largest farmland owner. The largest landowner is John Malone, the telecoms mogul, or the Emmerson lumber baron family if you're counting shared ownership.
It ignores it, but not in favor of the bottom 90%, it looks like the numbers for % of pension entitlements have dropped significantly for the bottom 90% and went up only for the top decile.
Indeed, and if you divide that pension cashflow by, say, 4%, you arrive at equivalent wealth figures that can be very significant. Say somebody retires from the military as a low-ranking officer. You don't think of them as particularly wealthy, but once you value their cashflow, you realize they're loaded.
The value is money/time. $1M over 40 years is only $25,000/yr, minus inflation and tax. Wherever that person lives, I don't suppose they feel 'loaded'.
I think what's more important is that we used to get interest on our savings accounts, and now we have to gamble with corporations to make any returns.
I'm making 5.3% on a savings account and have been making at least 4% for over a year. When the overnight rates go up, move cash into FDIC insured high yield accounts. If you're still getting no interest on your savings, you're being robbed.
It is very easy to answer (and impossible to actually do). Two things:
1. Progressive taxation scale. Not the fake system we have in every developed country, but the real progressive system, which doesn't end at the minuscule sum of 100-200k, but is proportional until the infinity, certainly into the billions.
2. "Ban" offshores and tax heavens.
If this has happened somehow magically a vast majority of the financial issues would go away immediately.
Simultaneously, an unfathomably large sum of money would become available in use-it-or-lose-it fashion to the billionaires. Political spending on the 2020 election was about $15 billion, while you're advocating a system that would substationally rebalance a $4.4 trillion national revenue stream. Do you think that the rich would spend more than $15 billion fighting that? Bezos made $70 billion this year and in previous years had an effective tax rate of about 0.9%. Increase that rate to 37% - or extrapolate a curve forward from $578k - and if he succeeded then by himself he could profitably spend more fighting this proposal than Biden, Trump, and every super PAC spent in 2020.
Yes but I think the outrage isn't about wealthy engineers and merchants, but that there is not a suitable protection to prevent wealthy children from joining the rentier class and subsequent failure to contribute to society.
For arguments sake, I don't think it's outrageous to guarantee someone who has created great value that their children will live comfortably throughout their lives. But there may be a class of people who consume a disproportionate amount of goods and services who have not personally contributed to our society, but by fortune of birth are allowed to continue an extravagant lifestyle.
I think even more than their lack of contributions to society, but the power their wealth brings to continue to protect their wealth, privilege, uphold the status quo, and continue widening the disparity of wealth between classes.
People don't want to be told the world is a meritocracy when it's roulette (born to the right people in the right place), but so much of the system operates under the meritocracy/exceptionalism belief system (American dream, effort and skill will lead to success, anyone can succeed), and if people see it for what it is, lots of people are not a fan of the changes that will occur. "They live" [1] for a suboptimal economic arrangement. "You aren't successful? Have you tried working harder? Being smarter? Knowing the right people? Getting a better job?" [2] [3]
Wealthy people want to stay wealthy, powerful people don't want to give up power. Everything else is a struggle over the collective spreadsheet. "Should life be more fair? If so, what does that look like?" is what keeps all of this in perpetual tension.
> People don't want to be told the world is a meritocracy when it's roulette (born to the right people in the right place)...
Look at it from the perspective of the parents. My kid is my kid because I decided to have it and it's got 50% of my DNA. I decided to not have my kid in my Somalia. Just as my parents decided not to have me in Somalia.
And all around me I see how so many parents making terrible life choices.
I'm teaching my kid to answer "blame your parents".
I dont think there is anything wrong with safety nets, but I think its silly to think that over 50% of the world is going to live like kings when the work like fast food laborers.
The pertinent takeaway is that a professional career would yield a much higher percentage of total equity ownership in prior decades.
I worked at a shop where the pay scale worked out like the following.
- Eng2: 140k
- Eng Manager: 180k
- Eng Director: 250-500k depending
- C suite: 20 MM per year (direct payment)
- Founder: > 200 MM per year (ownership stake/cap gains).
I suspect that such scales are more common than we know.
> It’s the natural order of things. Sure we can play with the levers of society and make it so that number is higher or lower, but you also might mess up.
These are mutually contradictory: if we can shift that ratio by policy, it’s a choice. Yes, some choices will have drawbacks but if the number has shifted by 20 points in recent decades it can’t be “the natural order of things” and it’s completely reasonable to ask whether different percentages would be better for society overall.
The natural order of things is if Bill has a billion dollars and I want that billion dollars I kill him and steal it. What we have is supposed to be an improvement on that, but if most people are starting to feel differently, those holding the money should be worried.
No matter who is in charge, the world is going to be messed up in various ways.
Upsetting the economic pyramid will naturally form a new pyramid, with concentrations of wealth at the top. Pereto + Solow–Swan...eg In communist(ish) countries, the concentration incidentally ends up in the hands of the highest political positions and a few private individuals.
No, there is nothing "natural" about our current ownership distribution. Was Gilded Age wealth concentration "the natural order of things"?
>>Its not like the 10%ers (outside the Physician cartel) are writing laws to entrench their positions.
Are you trolling? Have you never heard of PAC's? SuperPAC's? What do you think campaign contributions to legislators are buying? Many industries and wealthy individuals/groups are in fact doing exactly this.
Well, it's a bad thing for 90% of American households no matter how you look at it. Additionally, based on the comment from dwallin, it's likely a bad thing for 99.9% of American households. This is an odd state of being for a democracy, you'd think that we'd support laws that benefit the majority, since the idea of democracy is that the majority sets policy.
> Well, it's a bad thing for 90% of American households no matter how you look at it.
It sounds like you believe that if the ownership share of the top 10% went up, then the average wealth of the bottom 90% went down. The latter does not follow from the former. Both can have seen increases in wealth.
Your "precise statement" was a manipulative statement, for which both the question and answer are meaningless. Just because you state a question does not mean you get to dictate the discussion. Growth of income is one thing, but the far more important thing is wealth inequality, and the U.S. has one of the worse in the world, especially for a developed nation. As wealth inequality goes up, more people die, more people suffer, etc.
Here's the equivalent of your statement: If I throw a penny into a fountain at the mall, has the wealth of the fountain gone up or down?
Here's more realistic and relevant discussions on the relative gross of the lower classes:
Wealth for the lower 90% has gone up but that is nearly meaningless when the cost of living has increased much greater than any of those wealth increases.
This is precisely correct, ironically downvoted. The 90%/10% is a distraction, the pool of wealth is nearly unlimited as long as we have natural resources (energy, materials).
This trend will continue until resources are no longer exploitable, or people trying to enrich themselves created artificial scarcity or restrict their trade.
This is false. The concentration of wealth directly correlates with increases of death, starvation, suffering, etc. Inequality is by far the most important measure. "Growth" of income is effectively meaningless on its own without relative comparisons to the other classes in your own country and the significantly higher increases in the cost of living. If you look for the narrative you'd like, you can certainly find a number in isolation supporting it. But that narrative falls down when you look at the whole picture.
actually no, I don't think anyone should look at the wealth spread in the US and think that it's normal or good. It's objectively dangerous and undemocratic. If someone can earn millions a day from passive investment but someone who actually provides meaningful goods and services day-to-day barely makes 50k a year, I think we have totally misunderstood as a society what to value and how to distribute resources
>There are plenty of people on earth living less than $1usd a day and would trade their situation gladly for a very comfortable $50kusd/year.
This is absolutely besides the point. I also wish as many people as possible could make enough money to live comfortable lives but it has nothing to do with the problem of people passively earning millions of dollars without contributing anything positive to society.
imagine if i told you that i think everyone deserves to make a wage that allows them to thrive and have stability.
Also consider that A) things are more expensive here and B) our economy is debt based and many people with homes and cars in the US have negative income after expenses, just because aesthetically our poverty looks different, it doesn't mean that it's good. It's not comparable.
Debt is heavily marketed, but ultimately a personal choice. For those who choose to live within their means and not take on debt, they don’t have most of their paycheck going out the door to pay for last month, or have negative income.
I’ve had people who make less than me tell me I live like a poor person. That’s ok. I know I’m doing fine and they have since told me about some of their money struggles, and have a lot of debt to deal with each month.
Maybe if people stopped using debt to pretend they had more than they do, we’d see more reasonable housing and car prices, as well as goods that are made with some quality and repairablity instead of things like fast fashion that simplely gets thrown away.
Companies doing business in the US go to where the demand is. People need to stop using debt to demand junk that makes things worse.
Step one could be ratching down the average home size. It has more than doubled since the 1950s, while the number of people in the house has gone down. A bigger home is naturally going to be more expensive to buy/build, but then it also takes more land, has higher property taxes, costs more to heat/cool, costs more to repair and maintain, has more rooms to furnish, and has more place to put stuff before a person needs to stop and question if this need all of it. Simply living in a more modest home or apartment can have a massive effect on a person’s finances.
if your opinion is that some people make millions a day and some people make $1 a day and thats just life and we shouldnt try to change that, I think you are fundamentally lost.
Also consider: where do the billionaires in the US get the resources to fuel their empires? Do they get their cobalt from slave labor mines in the Congo? Do you think maybe there is some kind of connection between corporate greed in America and people on the other side of the world making $1/day or less?
That is an entirely different problem and more of a red herring than a talking point.
"Better" is entirely relative and using a western-centric framework to assert a "hierarchy of goodness". However, it is not an objective frame, and there are plenty of detractors both endogenous and exogenous.
What is really of interest here is one, the consolidation of wealth into a pinhead of the population, and two the egregious and worsening condition of wealth distribution in the US. Which I would argue exacerbates the global condition through manifold conductors, in essence it's imperialism-via-market but in equal measure an unabashed use of threats in other capacities to keep other countries in line.
Most people, given the time (which they necessarily trade away) would, I expect, prefer a definitively ethical, sustainable, robust product - however this comes at a cost (which is what they purchase with their increasingly devalued time) and so what we end up with is a consumer-driven market where people don't have enough time to peer down the rabbit hole of ethics and sustainability, instead opting to take the wheel for what best appears to suit their demands. This is then papered over simply by hand waving that introducing the Western market regime is improving conditions globally, which I'll again point out that this is relative. And I think this then suffers further amplification because, it seems for a great many decades, that the US itself has been suffering a slow decline. This itself has many impacts, for instance it has been increasingly salient that something like home ownership is becoming less prominent and so the social fabric must be altered. These dynamics may take a lifetime to shift to meet equilibrium, so you'll have to forgive the many hundreds of millions of people for their disinterest in global affairs when the social contract their forebears penned them is burning to ash.
It's insane to consider people suffering from malnutrition, lack of education, food scarcity, lack of access to healthcare as "entitled brats". I just don't even understand how one comes to that conclusion.
you know all this shit is connected right? the rich in America exploit labor to accumulate profit -> funnel that shit into investments to passively increase their income -> investment firms squeeze their controlled companies to generate more profit to increase shareholder value -> companies outsource labor to the 3rd world to reduce costs and give savings to shareholders -> those foreign businesses exploit their workers to a greater degree because there is less/none regulation -> people in other countries get paid $1 a day
Fighting corporate greed in the US is in effect fighting for the rights of laborers internationally that are negatively affected by American business interests. No one who fights for this kind of change does so for selfish reasons, it's for all of us.
There is a another way to look at it, though maybe not very positive. It tells me that though they probably have preferred stock and other types of investments I don't have access to, I should invest in whatever they invest in. People with that much wealth and power are going to fight to the end to keep it, I might as well ride along.
This is naive. They will never let that happen. Those at the top regularly insider trade, manipulate the market, and perform all sorts of lobbying to make sure the game is in their favor. You are not playing with the same rules as they are.
For example, just look at the contribution limits for IRAs and Roth IRAs. They are disgustingly low, limiting people with salaries just barely big enough to afford a mortgage with an hour commute. Now, why is that? It's because it keeps the middle class in place while the upper class has several loopholes they exploit to put generational levels of money into these accounts. The story goes on and on.
This is a weird take, even if the game is rigged no amount of market manipulation can defeat just buying and holding.
Those are limits on tax advantaged accounts. You can put any amount of money you want into whatever market and have the growth taxed at capital gains rates. If you're talking about backdoor Roths you can (and should) take advantage of it, it's not a rich-person only thing.
If it isn't only a rich people thing, then how do people amass hundreds of millions and even billions in Roth IRA accounts? Those numbers far exceed, by many orders of magnitude, the contribution limits and assumptions of 10% growth over decades.
It moots your whole point. Indexes beat almost all hedging strategies in the long run beating all but a tiny sliver of active investors. The super wealthy that try lots of tricks almost always do worse than an index of the market.
An easy example is Roth IRAs. The contribution limits, including for conversions, are set quite low. The limits this year are $7,000, but that's including several jumps over the past few years. So according to this number, one could nominally contribute or convert (via a backdoor Roth conversion) $210,000 over 30 years, which would then of course likely grow at the market rate of approximately 10%. That would yield approximately $1,153,203 for a person able to max out a Roth IRA every year for 30 years, assuming this year's limit as a constant. Such a person is likely in the middle to upper middle class.
However, the super wealthy are able to amass tens, hundreds, and even thousands of millions of dollars in Roth IRAs, and furthermore, they use these accounts as investment vehicles into investments not available to non-super wealthy people. The only way that's possible, in accounts with strict and low limits, is through various loopholes in the system available to them because of their wealth.
It implies you are not living in a communist society, and therefore allowed a measure of control over your own life. It means you have the right to own property, while making it less likely that you'll be sent to a reeducation camp, or die of starvation.
Meanwhile, if you want the Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of this world to stop being so rich, there is actually a simple, straightforward way to achieve this: STOP GIVING THEM MONEY. Don't order crap of Amazon. Don't look at ads on social media. Don't buy that luxury electric car. It's not them taking all the money, it's us giving it to them.
Pretty sure the word you were thinking was "taxes", "taxes" is the thing that we once made rich people pay and it funded a lot of stuff so even if they made a lot of money it didn't matter as much.
The idea that we as consumers are responsible for the actions of the rich or giant companies is ludicrous. The only way to affect meaningful change is through the state.
Let's be serious. This is just one logical fallacy after another.
One doesn't have to be communist to think that there needs to be some control levers on wealth inequality.
Even if communism were required, communism does not necessarily lead to reeducation camps and starvation.
Layered and purposefully obscured ownership structures make it nearly impossible to 'stop giving money' to the ultra wealthy.
Even if everyone stopped giving money to the ultra wealthy, they're not going to stop being ultra wealthy unless they're especially stupid with their current holdings.
Further, how does one stop giving money to those who partially or fully own monopolies on necessities?
I mean while we're at it we should also make heroin legal and easily accessible with ads for it. There's a simple solution if a lot of people get addicted just STOP GIVING HEROIN COMPANIES MONEY
> It implies you are not living in a communist society, and therefore allowed a measure of control over your own life
OK red scare calm down. I think you overestimate how much control capitalism gives you. Criticizing the economy does not make you a commie. If you wanna lay down and accept oligarchy because you are afraid of communism be my guest, but I would highly suggest you fight for slightly better circumstances for yourself and your neighbors.
> STOP GIVING THEM MONEY
If oligarchy was limited to Bezos, Zuck, and Musk that would be easy! But billionaires kind of own everything? Our food supply is controlled by a handful of megacorps, our communication network is administered by a few others, real estate is a game for giant investment groups, health care is a fucking joke... It's impossible to elect to not participate in the economy, or at least its impractical for everyone to live off the grid.
Listen I know you think that communism means the goberment controls everything (it doesnt), but at least I can vote for my gov reps. I don't get a fucking vote when Blue Cross Blue Shield is deciding where I can go to the hospital.
I agree that inequality is not a good thing, but a large part of the outrage is just the fact that it seems unfair.
We can read articles like this, but there are also interesting facts like how a huge percentage of poor Americans have a problem with obesity, something only kings and aristocracy could suffer from just a handful of generations ago. Or die from overdoses (they have free resources to spend on recreational drugs).
Our poor people have transcended the traditional problems of poor people, they are no longer dying from starvation but now obesity. They don’t die of overwork but from recreational abuse of dangerous substances. I don’t disagree with anything in the article but it is worth looking at from a historical perspective.
I think my point is that yes things are unequal, but it’s also worth remembering how much the floor has been raised as well. I would prefer to try continuing to raise the floor rather than lowering the ceiling.
To me, this reads the same as "90% of emails are processed by a couple hundred servers at Google". I buy ETFs because I don't want to directly handle investments.
Equities went up 5x over that time period. Of course it exacerbated the difference in equity holdings. Had equities gone down 50% over that time period, we'd have seen the opposite.
It does when you consider a good chunk of people have 0 at the start... and new people come in but less people "leave" when the market is going up rapidly. Households is not a static pool.
If that doesn't compute... look at the chart in the article. Is it just a strange occurrence that the chart almost perfectly follows the stock market itself? That magical dip in 2008... ?
> Editor's note: This story and chart were corrected to reflect that it is 93% of U.S. households' stock market wealth (not 93% of the stock market) that is held by the wealthiest 10% of those households.
This is actually kind of an important distinction. If you add back in things like pension funds that distributes things a lot more generously.
Also, I am not sure if 1 in 10 people I know even own stock directly. 1/10th of the population is still a lot of people and it almost surely skews more by age than any other metric.
Pensions don’t increase their payouts when the market is booming and you can’t include them in a will. So is it’s really not stock ownership as you just get the downsides without the upside.
Is the goal financial security in retirement, or perfectly uniform stock market ownership distribution? Annuities suffer from similar problems but like, if the retiree has sufficient income, at the end of the day, who cares if they personally own part of the stock market?
People see these power law distributions and are surprised? But like, do you actually want enforced uniform wealth (communism)?
I think the issue is more that power laws distributions have a lot of negative externalities. Inequality is correlated with a lot of societal problems.
> People see these power law distributions and are surprised? But like, do you actually want enforced uniform wealth (communism)?
This is a really all-or-nothing take. A handful of people are arguing for enforced uniform wealth, most people are just pointing out that our current economic system is marginalizing a growing number of people each year, while enriching a handful of giga-wealthy individuals.
Communism is more like “off the books” wealth in a lot of ways. In capitalism the people who control sections of the economy “own” them in the same way one owns a shoe. In communism people still control sections of the economy, it just isn’t shown on paper. They do extract personal benefit from that control, it’s just in the form of a weird and inefficient black market barter system.
https://archive.is/emsQK