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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

#81

Post by stagger87 »

zjaffee wrote: post #51
jokoon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income. Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless. You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but si…

This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10% think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford a million dollar home, take yearly vacati…

Roughly 40% of households have an income between 35k and 100k. This makes your statement that "there is hardly a middle class" absurdly wrong.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#82

Post by harryh »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #72
leetcrew wrote: post #13

> Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. this statement is literally true, but aside from "in relative terms", the wording of the whole sentence seems to evoke a zero sum game. I see this type of writing in most articles about inequality and I wish the authors would strive to be more explicit. it's an important distinction, even if we agree that rela…

Except it isn't really true. Much of the economic recovery post 2008 was fueled by the FED buying assets. They've been buying stocks and bonds to keep the prices rising. So the FED has been directly handing money to people who own stocks and bonds. We can argue as to whether this is better, worse or functionally equivalent to directly taking money from the middle class, but it isn't exactly the same thing. I personal…

The FED hasn't been buying stocks. That is wrong.

The FED's assets are nearly all in US Gov't Treasury Bond's & Mortgage backed securities.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/files/quarterl...

Your policy preference completely misunderstands the role of the FED in the economy. Any proposal in that area would have to be run by the Federal Government, not the FED Bank.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#83

Post by weberc2 »

AstralStorm wrote: post #66
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A K-12 student's performance correlates strongly with the family's wealth [1], and interacts with several other factors like race category, stable home life, and the low incidence of everyday violent crime. If rich people successfully exclude poor people, which can be done with legal price mechanisms instead of illegal discrimination, public school performance remains high. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201…

Even without price there are other mechanisms - accumulation of rich in specific places by word of mouth alone... where the influence and money is accumulated and applied. We see this even in primary education even in Europe, even in non-private schools. Then there are extracurriculars which take money amd time... A typical person out of place won't be able to keep up.

This is an interesting observation. Basically freedom of association, like many freedoms, is working against equality. I'm nowhere near the 9.9 percent, but it unnerves me to think about restricting someone's basic freedoms even if it benefits me.

Also it strikes me as odd that we focus on relative wealth fluctuations. Shouldn't we be more concerned about the number of people who can't afford basic necessities? If the poor are getting poorer, it seems like we should be concerned about that regardless of the performance of the rich. If the poor are getting richer but less slowly than the rich, isn't that still a good thing, or am I naive?

Personally, I don't need to keep up with the 9.9%, but I'm content if my family's fortunes keep improving.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#84

Post by CM30 »

asdffdsa321 wrote: post #73
zjaffee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10% think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford a million dollar home, take yearly vacati…

Huh? That's entirely incorrect. There's definitely a middle class that isn't working paycheck to paycheck but can't afford million dollar homes, vacas and college for their kids.

There's also a part of that middle class who can afford vacations and college for their kids, but not million dollar homes. Even if that group is likely bigger outside of the US (since hey, college in European countries like the UK is damn cheap by comparison), it still exists over there in the US too. Neither of those things necessarily require a millionaire income.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#85

Post by Latteland »

asdffdsa321 wrote: post #73
zjaffee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10% think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford a million dollar home, take yearly vacati…

Huh? That's entirely incorrect. There's definitely a middle class that isn't working paycheck to paycheck but can't afford million dollar homes, vacas and college for their kids.

To me the point is that "other middle class" you mention, call it lower middle class, is shrinking, falling into the lower class. Because of loss of decent paying factory jobs, retail shrinking, etc. If you are an adult today without special education, it's really hard to have a decent lifestyle. Most of my friends are programmers or teachers, and they most all of them have decent jobs. The teachers are increasingly in that lower middle class category. Software engineers are more fortunate.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#86

Post by fpig »

If you pick 4.73% or 17.23% as the cutoff point you will reach the same conclusions, the numbers behave as you would expect. I read a similar article once that focused on the top 20% by income, this one focuses on top 10% by wealth... The reality is that there is no "aristocratic cutoff point" - people get richer (and their incomes go up) faster smoothly as you go towards the right on the curve.

I don't understand why the author feels his "top 10%" cutoff is somehow especially insightful and "smarter" than the 1% one. It is entirely arbitrary.

He says:

“We are the 99 percent” sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis.

But if you do an analysis of the 1%, the advantages you ascribe to the 9.9% will hold much more strongly. If you do it for the top 20% they will also hold, but less strongly. You just picked a number and ran with it. There is nothing insightful there.

Income inequality has been growing but what the author is attempting to do is childish, although the article is surprisingly well-written considering how stupid the core idea is.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#87

Post by seem_2211 »

zjaffee wrote: post #51
jokoon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income. Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless. You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but si…

This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10% think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford a million dollar home, take yearly vacati…

Yep, you see it a lot in San Francisco (I've noticed it creeps into my mind a lot more frequently than I'd like to admit).

The thing is, it's like the boiling a frog in water analogy. You get desensitized to it. I tend to work with salespeople, so there's a tendency to get flashier things than a lot of my programming friends, but it manifests in things like always having the latest iPhone (or it's Android equivalent), travelling internationally a couple times a year, going for brunch whenever you feel like it, being able to save a good $10-15k yearly without really trying. Maybe hitting Tahoe a few times in the winter. Going to Soulcycle or Equinox to work out during the week. But you still can't buy a house in San Francisco. So you don't feel rich, but compared to the average American you're taking home a multiple of what they're making. It shocked me to find out the average household income is about $60k annually.

We all live in a bubble. San Francisco is a bubble. Dayton Ohio is a bubble as well. And when you live in a city with a ton of rich people (and a sizeable population probably in the bottom 10%) it gets pretty easy to forget about the other 80% who live somewhere in the middle of it all, in Concord, or Pleasanton or whatever they call it in the East Bay.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#89

Post by LateRuin »

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…

>If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not?

Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents / divorced / never married

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#90

Post by Latteland »

Aeolun wrote: post #46
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.

I'm intrigued by thinking about wealth vs income. To get to the 1% in income takes $250k a year, apparently 195k gets you to the top 2%. So in Seattle, that means that almost every software engineer at a big company (amazon, facebook, microsoft, google, etc) with 10 or 15 years of experience is probably in the 1%. Thousands and thousands of people. If I was a dental hygienist like my mom, or a teacher, I'd be middle class but not 1%.

We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are, those of us software engineers. I am hoping against my expectation that somehow there will be good jobs in the future for more than the 1% (bio-medical engineering maybe?).

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