Well, i don't see what is wrong with it. Apart that common people don't invest even a bit. This is what happens always with everything. Some people find joy in accumulating stock and others in drinking beer every evening.
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
171–180 of 606 posts
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, most of Elon Musks assets today are also not cash and highly dependent on the federal government going his way on key issues. He's certainly not dumb doing what he does if his goal is to get richer and more powerful. But unlike 200 years ago, we can watch live how that stuff plays out.
> certainly not dumb Perhaps but IMHO it’s a very high risk strategy and I doubt it’s necessarily optimal if more wealth is his primary goal (as opposed to his other seemingly highly megalomaniacal ambitions..) So far his actions haven’t really been that beneficial for Tesla (of course its sales growth might have significantly slowed down even if he stayed out of politics). SpaceX can only make that much even if it g…
Any risk Elon's taking is peanuts compared with George Washington taking on the world's leading colonial power...
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#173So a stock market and/or real estate crash can actually be good to reduce inequality . In fact I think its about the only way to dramatically reduce inequality. Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.
You guys are so obsessed with inequality because you're always looking in the other guy's cup. I don't care about inequality at all - only absolute living standards. The US has been an unequal place all its history and it's a tremendous country to live in. Here's a recipe for happiness: stop comparing yourself to others and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. It's old advice, but it's clearly been forgotten.
Living standards are important, sure. So are democratic standards, and rich people often subvert them. There has been a long, long tradition of that in the US too, and everywhere else. Sponsoring their chosen politicians, being newspaper proprietors, often also being patrons of the arts and deciding what gets made and by whom.
That amounts to cultural and political hegemony. Telling people to accept that is a little like telling them to know their place.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#174So a stock market and/or real estate crash can actually be good to reduce inequality . In fact I think its about the only way to dramatically reduce inequality. Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.
No, they always win. A stock market crash could actually be a boon to them to grab free chips on the table.
They are only scared of one thing.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#175In any kind of non-uniform distribution of any good, the top x % will always own a disproportionate (wrt to headcount) amount of it (In economic systems, this mathematical fact is further amplified by other factors such as financial literacy and leverage).
What's always missing to me in these types of discussions is what this value should be at, and what the distribution should look like qualitatively (i.e. what should the ideal Lorenz curve look like).
Is there any discussion/research/case study analysis where this is explored? I.e. overall citizen satisfaction/economic productivity and how it relates to wealth distribution?
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#176I was very surprised by the holiday budget. Less than 2500$ for 80% of the population? Does that mean that no one from these 80% stays in a Hotel or AirBnB for longer than a week with their family? No one travels overseas, or if so, only every 5 years or so? 2000$ is what you can easily spend on plane tickets for a family of 4.
Sounds like my holiday budget. My primary school kid has never flown an airplane, nor been in a hotel, but a few airbnb's, road trips. I would say it's for climate reasons, but really it's the money.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are telling me there is hope after all? (I mean, unless there's a federal ruling that it's unconstitutional to let a Musk and his money part ways.)
Hope for what? Who would benefit?
The American people, the Constitution, Ukraine, Europe, the whole world probably. The US is about to drag the world into a recession or a War Economy.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#178Top 10% is actually a lot of people! Wealth equality is not really a goal, it better to ask if the bottom 50% got wealthier in absolute terms, which the author answers in another post: https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2024/06/the-bottom-50/
It also depends on what being in the bottom 50% gives you a claim on.
If you have no net wealth, but a Scandinavian-style social safety net (not just retirement income, but healthcare, free access to arts/culture/parks and so on), you can still live a good life.
"Does the 80th percentile have an outsize claim on lifelong wellbeing relative to the 20th percentile" is a better metric than just looking at bank balances.
Also have to consider age effects, to what extent people move naturally up and down through the centiles through early and late working life and retirement. Looking at net wealth centiles in isolation doesn't tell you very much about how a society works.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#179I was very surprised by the holiday budget. Less than 2500$ for 80% of the population? Does that mean that no one from these 80% stays in a Hotel or AirBnB for longer than a week with their family? No one travels overseas, or if so, only every 5 years or so? 2000$ is what you can easily spend on plane tickets for a family of 4.
I think this is a pretty good example of the vast disconnect between reasonably high wealth and low wealth families. If you're in the bottom bracket, it's very likely you don't even have a vacation in any meaningful way, at best you have time off. The lower you are in the division, the starker the difference.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Grok suggests around 15% of US adults are involved in starting or running new businesses, based on recent data. This makes it sound like much of the people in the 10% are there because they started with most of the stock of the companies they created. .. or those that own stocks are more likely to be in a position to start a company. one of these possibilities seems more likely than the other if you ask me.
> .. or those that own stocks are more likely to be in a position to start a company. probably. So I guess the real debate is inheritance vs self-made and whether inheritance is good or bad.
don't fall into the trap of limiting the argument to inheritance, there are far more benefits to being born into a wealthy family.