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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

#161

Post by doktrin »

Latteland wrote: post #140
doktrin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are This only applies to a small fraction of engineers clustered in a literal handful of geographic areas. I personally don't know a single engineer in my country that makes $200k (and the cost of living here is just as high as any major US city). Earning half that is seen as a very good salary.

Well, I did say Seattle. Yes, I'm fortunate. I did move here for a good job 20 years ago. I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.

> I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.

Logically it should at least not hurt the rest of the market, but anecdotally : during my time in the midwest, salaries were stagnant / sticky around $80k so I would caution against overestimating the trickle down effect of coastal income.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#162

Post by bhawks »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #151
bhawks wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nimbyism is only a regional factor. I think we agree this is a national conversation.

Local themes can manifest at scale. Many large cities are affected by generational NIMBYism. That collects to produce a macroeconomic effect.

But the data doesn't show that there's a bunch of rich old folks mooching on the labor of everyone else.

Basically the median elderly person has enough money to pay off the median house and then nothing else. After a lifetime of work isn't this acceptable?

Secondary source: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/time-to-bury-pew-report...

On mobile otherwise I would link in the primary data.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#163

Post by Jill_the_Pill »

seibelj wrote: post #58
distances wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power. Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?

I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors. Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts. But even without option 2, option 1 would…

When they create those new charter schools, they "compete" entirely on test scores. But no-excuses drill-and-kill for test scores is exactly the opposite of what's offered to the children of the elite, who get time to play and experiment, develop creativity and social skills, participate in arts and music, all in a non-restrictive environment.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#164

Post by jhbadger »

jokoon wrote: post #38
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 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…

But can't you see it's just part of the plan of the really wealthy to distract attention to themselves? "Don't blame us; blame your neighbor who has a bit more than you do".

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#165

Post by segmondy »

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…

Yup, there's about 10 million millionaire households in US

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#166

Post by perl4ever »

jadedhacker wrote: post #76
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…

> Class differentiation is the central meaning of life. This is patently not true. We overthrew kings, introduced democracy, and eliminated slavery. Every time we have made people more equal, our society has become more open and less morally repugnant. Trying to be the winner of class competition is vulgar Marxism. You don't need so many things to be happy in life, nor do you need to dominate others. You merely need…

I don't care about class competition, nor do I need a "lot" (by the standards of the wealthy) of things to be happy in life. But I like things (art, collectibles) that wouldn't exist except for social competition of the rich, regardless of whether I will ever own them. I like that they exist. When people won't shut up about how terrible possessions and competition are, it tells me they are so torn up and conflicted about their own desires for money, possessions, and power, that they can't appreciate beautiful things.[1]

[1]https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1941-packard-120-convertib...

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#167

Post by wetpaws »

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…

>yearly vacation >kids being able to go to college

People must be insane thinking this is some kind of luxury for rich people, not basic human needs.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#168

Post by seibelj »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #163
seibelj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors. Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts. But even without option 2, option 1 would…

When they create those new charter schools, they "compete" entirely on test scores. But no-excuses drill-and-kill for test scores is exactly the opposite of what's offered to the children of the elite, who get time to play and experiment, develop creativity and social skills, participate in arts and music, all in a non-restrictive environment.

I have no comments on how the charters are run, which is why I use them only as an example. I just think it's a tragedy that if you live in a district with a terrible school, with no capability of moving, your children are screwed out of an education.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#169

Post by wetpaws »

anbende wrote: post #154
hyperpape wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 en…

I couldn't find any firm numbers on "the 2nd 1%", so I'd probably have to get my hands on some data to calculate it. That makes sense though. 1%, 9% and 90% may be a reasonable approximation of upper, middle, and lower classes. And I think your point about the interests of the 9% being more aligned with the 1% than the 90% is an important one. Which is part of the author's point as well, that the 9% are really benefi…

People are wired to think of a wealth as a zero sum game. If tomorrow everybody's income will increase by 10%, people will pay much less attention at their income getting bigger, but the fact that this increase is smaller in absolute value that someone's else. Which would naturally feel to them as if they were robbed of this extra somehow.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#170

Post by matthewdgreen »

CamTin wrote: post #149
FrozenVoid wrote: post #24

A clever manipulation piece: It melds 1% multi-millionaires with upper-middle class to create some kind of bourgeois enemy. In reality these 32 million people have different lifestyles, sources of income and their networth does not indicate true wealth: they could be living in an expensive house that they bought much cheaper, but a few trips into a hospital will bankrupt them. The whole concept of "net worth" is high…

Not accounting for people's home equity when determining their wealth is one of the most bonkers bougie things I've ever heard. Should we not count their 401k savings either, because "if X took the early withdrawal penalty" isn't fair either? If you're rich, you're rich. It makes no difference if that wealth is tied up in illiquid assets. If the precarity if your financial situation is based on the fact that you're w…

If every single person in the country made exactly the same salary, and saved the same percentage of their income to cover the exact same modest retirement lifestyle, you'd still have people (close to retirement) who appeared "rich" and people early in their career who appeared relatively "poor". Using wealth data without normalizing for age you could also make it look like there was a vastly unequal society, and of course there would no policy you could adopt to "fix" the problem that wasn't there. What the author is doing here is literally the definition of bad data science.
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