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The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

theatlantic.com

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#41

Post by hyperpape »

anbende wrote: post #2

Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the…

> I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.

I doubt this particular point. The 98th percentile of earners make something like $200-$300k a year, the 89th percentile make about $100k/year[0]. That's a big difference, and it will equate to an even bigger difference in wealth, but not enough that the 98th percentile will substantially outweigh the combined 89th-97th percentiles. (Arguing otherwise means assuming that the one group has 8 times as much wealth per capita as the other).

It's also true that the 98th percentile includes plenty of people in the HN crowd. That's the point: well paid professional types (or software engineers) are not being hurt by the gains that accrue to the very top of the income distribution.

So far as they/we cluster in the same industries/subsectors that are growing those billionaires, we have--to some extent--shared interests. For instance, Amazon software engineers might gain by clawing back money from Bezos and the stockholders, but they don't have a monetary interest in redirecting pay to the warehouse workers.

[0] immediate googled source: https://investormint.com/investing/how-much-does-the-top-1-m...

I always thought the 99th percentile started a bit higher, but this is roughly in line with what I've read before.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#42

Post by mozumder »

ainiriand wrote: post #28
mozumder wrote: post #12

Class differentiation is the central meaning of life. The struggle is the point. You get up and wear nice clothes in the morning so that you're better than the slob that doesn't. Nobody wants to be the same as everyone else. If everyone was equal, then there would be no point in your existence. You become a bag of mostly water. Celebrate the fact that a few billionaires and royalty and celebrities exists. Life is mor…

I agree with you in every point. It reminds me the saying of some writer of old: 'All of the struggle in life comes from the fact of not being able to stay quiet in a room for a long time'.

That's exactly it!

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#43

Post by dahauns »

Areading314 wrote: post #31

"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below" The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been "transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this: https://www.advisorperspect…

"The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate."

For the last two decades, your source actually says the opposite. The lowest three quintiles peaked in the dot-com bubble, with the bottom quintile losing the most (almost 10%) and only the middle quintile just recently reaching those levels again.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#44

Post by djajshgsjja »

danharaj wrote: post #25
nordsieck wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money Controlling policy is one thing. Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? Anyone who has money actually has some sort of capital or an equivalently powerful financial instrument be it stocks, loans to other companies, government bonds, a house, etc.

Just because you own, e.g. stock doesn't mean you control the underlying means of production it represents a share of. Most people who own stock do so as part of a retirement fund. Those institutional investors, banks, managers, politicians, corporate board members, CEO's, etc. Are the ones who actually control capital. It should be emphasized that a lot of how capitalism runs these days is in the hands of huge burea…

All those people you listed are still cogs in the machine, to varying degrees. The CEOs are beholden to the boards, who are beholden to the institutional investors, who manage my 401k. Certainly, the CEOs have higher leverage over the system on an individual basis. But anyone whose wealth is increasing mainly through return on capital is a member, if not a leader, of the capitalist class.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#45

Post by sologoub »

p49k wrote: post #8

Rebuttal from Slate: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-...

Key paragraph:

“He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees. According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution. Stewart’s “9.9 percent” includes a lot of working professionals and business owners with gilded academic résumés, sure. But it also probably encompasses a lot of 75-year-old former accountants and nurses and guys with construction businesses who made a comfortable living decades ago, bought a house, and paid down the mortgage while saving for retirement. There’s no real way to tell a consistent story about who these people are, which makes it a bit hard to blame them for the death of opportunity in this country.”

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#46

Post by Aeolun »

anbende wrote: post #2

Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the…

Needing 1.2 million to enter the top 10% gives some indication of the wealth these people have though.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#47

Post by imbokodo »

Areading314 wrote: post #31

"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below" The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been "transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this: https://www.advisorperspect…

As all wealth that can be created comes from work, and as the heirs who mostly make up the 0.1% do not work, it follows that the wealth comes from those below.

Actually the article has a fairly conservative vantage. As the pie is not what is significant. The wealth and money and pie have little significance. What matters is the expropriation of surplus labor time, by the heir, from the one who works. It is a social relationship, expropriating the worker's time. The pie, the wealth, the product is not what has significance here.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#49

Post by dgreensp »

hobls wrote: post #39
dgreensp wrote: post #11

Wait, so 10% of the county is millionaires (more or less, if 9.9% are 1.2-millionaires), and these people have such “good family, good health, and good jobs” that they might as well be a different species? If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? I think the author’s intent was to acknowledge privilege, but the article is just making more weird caricatu…

edit: Whoops. My recollection of the article was quite wrong! ---- No, the article states that the average wealth of the 9.9% is 1.2m. This is of course heavily influenced by people at in the top 1%; people in the 10th percentile are not all millionaires.

“As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 percent; $2.4 million to reach the group’s median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 percent.”

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#50

Post by sgt101 »

kolbe wrote: post #29
eternalban wrote: post #5

I couldn't help but think of Eyes Wide Shut when reading this. For those who have seen the film, the leading character, a physician who lives in Upper East Side in Manhattan, easily fits the bill (npi) of being a 9.9%er. But as Kubrick makes it clear, he is merely a well paid servant of the true hidden aristocracy, and very much preoccupied with matters that are of no concern to the aristocratic class. I agree with t…

That was just a fictional movie, man. I wouldn't read too much into that.

Bit like Chekhov?
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