Fixed pie fallacy.
Wealth Shown to Scale
11–20 of 147 posts
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#12I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that they will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionaires. Time and time again the wealth of the middle classes ends up as collateral damage in attempts to tax the very top.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#13Missing: median US Black household wealth, $24,100; median US Hispanic household wealth, $36,100. Numbers as of 2019. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
Well, it looks like two people were uncomfortable enough with these numbers to do something about it, and it only took 27 minutes! Unfortunately, y’all chose “stick my head in the sand” over “remediate the situation.”
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? These numbers are recent and reliably sourced. Try doing something productive, like, at least engaging with the data rather than trying to make it so people don’t see it.
I expected more respect for facts from you, HN.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#14I don't understand the concept or the graphics are rendered wrong on my computer.
Better would it be do explain with a standard distribution (what wealth isn't). Lets assume that 1 SD of income corresponds to 10 cm. So 3SD or 60cm, basically your screen size, corresponds to 99.7% of the population.
Some random data from the internet: "The median household income in Franklin County Ohio is about $43,000 although the average household income is closer to $54,000. The standard deviation of household incomes is about $30,000. You pick a random sample of 50 households. What is the chance the average household income in your sample is over $60,000?" https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/8/8.3
Household income may be even two earners. But assuming broadly 50k, sd 50k per person to make it easier and taking into account more affluent areas, only a few people make more than 200k per year.
Now lets assume Bill Gates or the Oligarch of your choice makes 10% ROE on his wealth. If he has 100 Billion, this is 10 Billion a year. This should be 200,000 Standard Deviations. If one SD corresponds to 10 cm, this should be 20 km on our scale.
So we can see the income of 99.7% of the population on our screen, but Bill Gates income would be 20 km away.
(Hope I made no mistake, feel free to correct)
PennState used an extraordinary bad example to teach the normal distribution, they chose a case where you have a fat tail distribution.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#15xkcd's "Money" graphic gives a sense of other value comparisons, in a somewhat logarithmic sense, ranging from $1 to the roughly $2.4 quadrillion dollars of all human economic activity to date (as of 2012 when the infographic was made).
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#16Erm, how about the wealth/money controlled by the Federal government? That's much bigger than anything shown here.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#17I disagree on the the thrust of the argument - that people (including comparatively wealthy individuals like doctors and lawyers) oppose changes to tackle wealth inequality because they don’t understand the gulf of wealth between them and the ultra rich. In my experience it has nothing to do with that - rather these people know that they will ultimately end up as the main target for any such law, not these billionair…
This is absolutely it. Any taxes on just the ultra wealthy raise so little money for the rest of the population that any large scale money raising requires taxes on doctors, lawyers, engineers, small business owners, etc.
Pro-government spending advocates don’t like to emphasize this because people become a lot less supportive of these things when they see members of their own community getting hit.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#18Nice graphic, but also a bit misleading. Bezos would never be able to immediately realise that amount of assets in to useful cash. So saying no human deserves this amount of wealth is kind of already fulfilled? He may have 2 or 3 billion as cash maybe.
What's "cash"? A marketable security?
I'm insanely poor by these standards but wealthfront will front me hard cash using my account as collateral with one click i think up to 30%. Super cheap interest rate.
Bezos has way more favorable banking. Even if he was 'only' worth $10-15 billion I bet he could get 2-3 billion in hard cash overnight.
He might not hold a lot of cash, but he doesn't need to he can get it immediately without selling.
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#19The rich aren't the enemy, rent-seekers are.
They may overlap, and Bezos may be both, but wealth and capital on their own are orthogonal to justice.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EHKZRLcW4AA1aju?format=jpg&name=...
Re: Wealth Shown to Scale
#20Nice work!
People don't really have an understanding of how much wealth has been coalescing in the last thirty years and this is a good start as showing them how skewed things really are.
Seriously; this is dangerous. Concentrating that much wealth in such few hands is bound to have negative consequences. And all of us professionals really should get onboard trying to tackle this.