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America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

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Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#101

Post by edoceo »

hungryhobo wrote: post #69
Pfhreak wrote: post #23

This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc. If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more…

sure, but i think the focus is on the magnitude and speed at which the wealth gap is widening. And its impact might be something we haven't encountered before

Last few times were "solved" by revolution. I'm expecting something similar.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#102

Post by carapace »

ryanmercer wrote: post #32

Around the same time this was shared to HN I Tweeted/FB/LinkedIn variations of the following >If I earned $10,000 a day it would take me 273.97 years to have earned 1 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Elon was worth about 20 billion a year ago, last month he was worth an estimated $185bn. Oof. In reality, I make a little over $17 an hour His net worth increased an estimated 4.66 million times my annual gross income in the…

Just yesterday I was reading a book called "Stones to Schools" about a small NGO that builds schools in remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I found it very uplifting.

It breaks my heart (out of its cold iron shell) to read about regular people busting out the checkbook for schools for kids halfway around the world (and typically of a different religion!) who have pretty much nothing.

"Don't let the turkeys get you down!" :)

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#104

Post by Grustaf »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #17
cjblomqvist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't wealth to a large degree relative? Like, if I'm richer than I value my time higher, meaning it's more expensive to buy my time (human services). Same with other resources such as land, gold or bitcoin. There's only so much of it thus the value rises. Of course the world can become more productive and thus make everyone (in average) more "wealthy", but only for certain things.

>But isn't wealth to a large degree relative Yes it is, but a few hundred billionaires with mansions and yachts don't really matter in the context of the broader economy. It's the upper middle class yuppies with substantial amounts of discretionary income driving up the prices on things that makes people poorer in the relative sense. There simply aren't enough billionaires to move the needle on the goods and services…

> mansions and yachts

I don't mind that at all. (Well OK I wish that rich people today would have more taste, and build Sistine Chapels instead of Mar-a-lagos) The problem is that when some people control more assets than entire countries, they will end up controlling government policies.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#105

Post by edoceo »

namelessoracle wrote: post #96
slowhadoken wrote: post #67

She had me with the history of income inequality and then she lost me with “wage gap” talk. Why is a plea for bipartisanship always followed by throwing shade at white men? It’s wearing on me.

It's the poison pill that Amazon/Walmart/et cetra have injected into the conversation to make sure they keep on top. Unless you think that all the top 1% have adopted identity politics out of the goodness of their hearts? It's just classic divide and conquer strategy. It's no coincidence that identity politics is so popular with the relatively affluent tech community who dont want to take a good hard look at themselv…

Kulak is on Wikipedia ""During the Russian Revolution, the label of kulak was used to chastise peasants who withheld grain from the Bolsheviks. According to Marxist–Leninist political theories of the early 20th century, the kulaks were class enemies of the poorer peasants""

TIL.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#106

Post by rendall »

ryanmercer wrote: post #32

Around the same time this was shared to HN I Tweeted/FB/LinkedIn variations of the following >If I earned $10,000 a day it would take me 273.97 years to have earned 1 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Elon was worth about 20 billion a year ago, last month he was worth an estimated $185bn. Oof. In reality, I make a little over $17 an hour His net worth increased an estimated 4.66 million times my annual gross income in the…

The downvotes on this are heartless.

My man, do what you can to improve your situation and if/when you can help out, do so. You will help the less fortunate by relentlessly improving your life. When you catch a breathe and life becomes fun, then spread some joy to others, but until then you are not in a position to feel guilty about it.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#107

Post by ksec »

natenthe wrote: post #57

Correction: The Fed's policies have taken $50T of wealth from the Bottom 90%. When you bail out irresponsibly over-leveraged and nearly bankrupted banks and corporations, and pay for those bailouts with tax-payer money, you steal from the poor and give to the rich. Most importantly, when the Fed decides to print money ad nauseam, they create massive asset inflation, which steals from the poor and gives to the rich. T…

>It amazes me why most people do not grasp this. I think it is lack of education.

I dont think that is the case at all. The concept is simple and easy enough to understand. Most people just dont care and want a single target to blame. And someone decide that target will not be government or Feds.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#108

Post by _qwfv »

jellicle wrote: post #89
Pfhreak wrote: post #23

This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc. If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more…

This proposition, discussed and shown by Piketty in his 2013 book, was not at all obvious before that and even today many people would argue (wrongly) that it isn't true. So if it's a natural law of wealth, it is a very recently proven one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

Marx presented this idea back in the 1860s. He phrased it a little differently and built the idea up from the idea of exchanging commodities.

In Marx's text, he discusses the history of commodity exchange, how people usually exchanged Commodities for Money which they exchanged back into other Commodities they needed. (E.g. I'll sell you my wool for coin, which I can use to buy food.) He called this CMC exchange. (Commodity-Money-Commodity).

This gave rise to people who had hoards of money, and could invert the exchange -- Money into Commodities into Money + delta Money. He called this MCM exchange (Money-Commodity-Money), and posited that it could only exist if the second M was larger than the first -- why turn your money into commodities and back into money if you weren't going to get more money as a result? So it must be that if MCM exchange exists, then it must be MC(M+∆M). Once sufficient hoards are accumulated, they will continue to accumulate.

Marx, of course, carries on with his own opinions about what to do with this and how society should be structured. He also bases his ideas not on data like Piketty, but on building up a model of a Capitalist economy from principles.

I think it's interesting to see this line of argument presented historically and compare/contrast that with the more data driven analysis we see in Piketty. (No matter how you feel about the rest of Marx's work.)

Edit: Downvotes? I feel like I'm presenting a factual response to the parent poster. I know it contains the word 'Marx', but I'm not diving into socialism/communism elements of his work, but rather the analytical dialectic of his critique of capitalism as a system.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#109

Post by saint_abroad »

bedhead wrote: post #31

"Taken" lol. Is there any journalist who can write about this with some intellectual honesty?

Well yes, taken.

The 2008 crisis was caused by irresponsible lending by the 1% with the effect of inflating costs for the 99%.

A bailout and a decade later we now see irresponsible lending by the Fed having the effect of inflating assets for the 1%.

Tails you lose, heads I win.

Re: America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%

#110

Post by dan_quixote »

_qulr wrote: post #43
Pfhreak wrote: post #23

This is almost a natural law of wealth. When you have significant capital, you can do things like loan it out with interest, leverage it into getting loans to build more capital, etc. If one assumes that the wealthy are using their money to buy commodities and selling those commodities with the expectation of getting their initial money back plus some delta, then it becomes fairly trivial to demonstrate that the more…

> This is almost a natural law of wealth. The article is about how the post-1975 period differs from the pre-1975 period. So it's demonstrably not a natural law. Natural laws don't change over time.

I interpret Pfhreak's comment to mean un-checked capitalism will naturally result in wealth consolidation. The article describes how we loosened our management of this natural law and witnessed a more rapid wealth shift as a result.
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