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Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

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Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#41

Post by johnswamps »

redwood wrote: post #26
Benjo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_distribution Wealth inequality is much more pronounced than income inequality, especially in the bottom quintiles.

Which is very interesting, if you think about it: it means that through a little more money now, you will generally have a lot more money later... i.e. money makes it easy to make money

No, it means that if you're poor, you're spending a larger percentage of your income and saving less of it. Poor people have to spend a higher percentage of their money on basic necessities such as rent, food, clothing, transportation, etc.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#42

Post by javert »

redwood wrote: post #20
pg wrote: post #6

I wouldn't be surprised if most respondents are answering as if the question were about income rather than wealth.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

it may be that, through the miracle of technology's abundance, we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, but only a smaller and smaller pool of people "own" the production engines.

I think the first part of what you said is right: we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, absent a paradigm shift in which the economy crashes like in Weimar Germany.

The second part of what you said -- about ownership of the "engines of production" -- is straight out of Marxism, which is, by the way, broken. More and more we live in an information economy; it's not about what you own, but what you know and what you can make.

That minor nit aside--who cares who owns what, as long as it isn't stolen from others and as long as quality of life continues to rise for everybody who puts in their share of effort?

What I mean to say is that the most important thing is that the system be fair, and let's be honest, fair does not mean an "equal distribution of wealth."

In fact, it seems pretty clear (especially when "nobody's starving") that what is fair is letting people earn based on their productive capability and effort, whether they're Steve Jobs, an average software developer, or someone with only a high school diploma.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#43

Post by drivebyacct2 »

jacoblyles wrote: post #31
redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

The fears of a plutocracy are overblown. You write that "money is power and speech". But people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney have tried to buy elections with their personal fortunes and it didn't work (and self-funded candidates do worse, on average, than other candidates). Political inertia, the passions of the mob, and the maladaptive incentives facing legislators and bureaucrats are much more potent forces sha…

How can you say that? I'm pulling stuff out of my ass and I'd be willing to put money on the fact that over 95% of our elected officials fall in the top 20%, probably even the top 10%.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#44

Post by Benjo »

redwood wrote: post #26
Benjo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_distribution Wealth inequality is much more pronounced than income inequality, especially in the bottom quintiles.

Which is very interesting, if you think about it: it means that through a little more money now, you will generally have a lot more money later... i.e. money makes it easy to make money

I agree. Incumbents are doing their best to rig the system resulting in further concentration of wealth.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#45

Post by parenthesis »

javert wrote: post #42
redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

it may be that, through the miracle of technology's abundance, we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, but only a smaller and smaller pool of people "own" the production engines. I think the first part of what you said is right: we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, absent a paradigm shift in which the economy crashes like in Weimar Germany. The second par…

Steve Jobs has "only a high school diploma".

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#46

Post by smarterchild »

Another way of looking at it: The data is completely overwhelmed by the super wealthy.

This is the very tail end of Fortune's richest people list.

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2010/10/billionaires-2010_The-Wo...

Any one of those people is worth 1 billion dollars, along with all the Gates's and Buffett's of the world. If I were pretty well off and worth, say, $1,000,000, it would take a thousand of me to equal one of him. And if I were a student with just a thousand dollars, it would take one million of me to get to one of him.

Based on that, the top quintile is not rich because of doctors, executives, basketball players or lawyers - it's billionaire company founders, investors, and the like. To test that hypothesis, I tried to find results marked by percentile, instead of quintile:

http://www.lcurve.org/WealthDistribution-1998.htm

The top 0.5% have 25.6% of the wealth and the next 0.5% have 8.4%.

---

(Side note, if you're thinking about income taxes: I'll bet there are more than a few people up at the top who get paid a dollar a year in salary.)

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#47

Post by philwelch »

johnswamps wrote: post #41
redwood wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is very interesting, if you think about it: it means that through a little more money now, you will generally have a lot more money later... i.e. money makes it easy to make money

No, it means that if you're poor, you're spending a larger percentage of your income and saving less of it. Poor people have to spend a higher percentage of their money on basic necessities such as rent, food, clothing, transportation, etc.

I think you and redwood are violently in agreement. If you have more money, you can save your money and that money will make you more money. If you have less money, you can't.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#48

Post by redwood »

javert wrote: post #42
redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

it may be that, through the miracle of technology's abundance, we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, but only a smaller and smaller pool of people "own" the production engines. I think the first part of what you said is right: we will continue on a track where we all have a high quality of life, absent a paradigm shift in which the economy crashes like in Weimar Germany. The second par…

The second part of what you said -- about ownership of the "engines of production" -- is straight out of Marxism, which is, by the way, broken. More and more we live in an information economy; it's not about what you own, but what you know and what you can make.

I don't agree: while it's important to know a lot to be valuable today, the people who are in this extreme high echelon of wealth are accumulating wealth through corporate ownership and they seem to be owning a larger and larger percent of those corporations.

Perhaps what you mean is that corporations, while dominant when it comes to dollars, are not necessarily continuing to be dominant wrt. the human experience. And this I agree with: the internet has opened the wealth of human knowledge to all of us. This freedom and the fact that so many of us spend our days doing what are effectively leisure of artistic pursuits means, even if we're not making money, we're contributing to man kind. And this is true: and not reflected in the wealth distribution, I agree.

Re: Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money

#49

Post by redwood »

jacoblyles wrote: post #31
redwood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that the bottom folks aren't as "needy" as folks were in, say, the great depression. - I.e. "no one starves in america" and most people know this: so while the distribution in wealth is extreme, the distribution in QUALITY OF LIFE is less extreme. - This biases people's view and makes them feel that generally, for most americans, things are okay. This is all true of course: except that the worry ab…

The fears of a plutocracy are overblown. You write that "money is power and speech". But people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney have tried to buy elections with their personal fortunes and it didn't work (and self-funded candidates do worse, on average, than other candidates). Political inertia, the passions of the mob, and the maladaptive incentives facing legislators and bureaucrats are much more potent forces sha…

Agreed today: but it could be that the wealthy will LEARN to be more controlling. Meg Whitman was a failure: but what if she's backed someone who was a great politician instead. And perhaps this is precisely how much of our politics already works.

I don't fear this as much as some because I know that elites have always held undue influence, and that has been generally a good thing, with some bad apples throughout. Small numbers of people have always had extraordinary sway in societies. It's just that today, with media and technology, the ratios are larger than ever before.

An interesting article on the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/business/26excerpt.html?_r...

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