Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

awealthofcommonsense.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 606 posts

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#511

Post by dragonwriter »

Gasp0de wrote: post #108

I 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.

> No one travels overseas, or if so, only every 5 years or so?

Yes, the vast majority of the US population has never traveled overseas. Many of those who do, do so once in a lifetime.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#512

Post by renewiltord »

xeonmc wrote: post #134
renewiltord wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I exhort you to rise above the most basic of primates. I have transcended the flinging of my faeces and it has brought me great joy.

> In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony God's blessing, but because, I am enlightened by my own intelligence.

Pearls before swine.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#513

Post by mrguyorama »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #464
adrian_b wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revolutions happen relatively peacefully only when a significant part of the armed forces changes sides or at least refuses to execute orders. With the transition from conscripted militaries to autonomous robotic weapons, there will be no more humans refusing to execute orders and no more traitors. A future revolution will succeed only against a grossly incompetent government.

Someone programs the robots. They can be a traitor. They can refuse, or put in a back door kill switch.

Meanwhile in the current day we can't even get programmers to agree to not build panopticons and advertising behemoths for not even that much money.

So, no, there will always be some programmer Chuds willing to write the "kill all the leftists/organizers" functionality.

And they will sleep soundly.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#514

Post by eddd-ddde »

ookblah wrote: post #31

I think about this from time to time and I suppose everything is cyclical in the end. Most of us would have been some peasant in the feudal age and when it gets really bad it always ends in a revolution of some sort. It's just on a global scale and timeframe now. As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only s…

Shouldn't that be the opposite of solace? My solace would be change happening in _my_ lifetime.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#515

Post by karmakurtisaani »

fxwin wrote: post #175

In 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 shou…

I doubt you can put a number on what the optimal distribution should look like without making some overly simplified model that necessarily ignores something important.

At the same time, one could imagine a situation where wealth is so abundant that even the lowest 1% could afford any modern luxury. In that case it probably wouldn't be so bad if the top few wealthiest individuals had enough money to buy and own whole planets. They would likely use their wealth to make life worse for others, as they tend to, but that's out of the scope of this model.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#516

Post by pydry »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #508
pydry wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs somewhere to live or money in the bank?

I dont think anyone would care if some people just had huge piles of money in the bank. Its what they do with the money that causes problems. That's income.

They use it to purchase assets which you need. This is a large component of the war on affordable housing.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#517

Post by oooyay »

rcxdude wrote: post #342
bigfatkitten wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Washington didn't have Lockheed Martin's hand in his pocket. Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arms.

Not relatively. They were incredibly expensive compared to the resources at the time, not least because of the difficulty of moving supplies around and the huge amount of opportunity cost in the lost work of the men recruited into the military.

That's a point, but frankly the wars were expensive because you have an organized, uniformed military that has to abide by UN regulations and the Geneva convention fighting people (guerilla units) that aren't held to any of those things. There's a cost to being legitimate and it's more than people would think.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#518

Post by alexashka »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #314
ninetyninenine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s different this time around. The sheer complexity of society makes it hard to ascertain exactly the true nature of the situation. People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. At worst we will get an angry mob stampeding the White House with no real direction or objective. Are rich people the problem or is it th…

> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. "Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it. "Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause ? Let's consider how that happens: When you buy something for $100, par…

This is an excellent post.

I think the competition idea works at the level of a country if people by and large play by the rules (a big if).

It does not work at the level of macro economics.

If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose.

Thus in a world of competition, every country will strive to get nuclear weapons to be able to compete militarily and then given that we're human, we will have conflict sooner or later and it will result in nuclear holocaust.

If you think fair enough but nuclear holocaust is just the price we pay and it's worth it to continue doing competition, then alright.

I don't think it's worth it, so there needs to be a fundamental re-think how we approach these problems.

---

Regarding wealth inequality specifically - I agree with Aristotle who made the distinction of Aristocracy vs Oligarchy. Aristocracy being the rule of the few for the common interest and Oligarchy being rule of the few for the interest of the rulers.

Somebody will rule, it's the intention and overall direction that matters. I'm not sure that just re-distributing wealth addresses the problem - it does strike me as something an Aristocracy would surely do if one were to appear, so that much is well and good.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#519

Post by johnthewise »

dumbledoren wrote: post #504
sigmoid10 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses o…

> 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War That was a rebellion, not a revolution. The colonial elite broke away from the mother country. They sculpted the eventual legal and political structure to protect their power and privilege without having to pay taxes. If you're looking for a revolution, better look at the French Revolution or the October Revolution.

The October Revolution wasn’t a popular uprising but a surgical strike by a minority faction. just after the take over, SRs were more popular but bolsheviks crushed them fast without much resistance. so it wasn't about what people wanted but what a determined minority could pull off.

Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

#520

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

ty6853 wrote: post #456
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we got rid of the federal government, and things didn’t break put into war or anything, would the issue be solved?

No nothing will 'solve' it, but it may attenuate it in some states. Although moving from size in early days to zero is your own strawman.

I guess my issue is more that I feel like you’re looking in the wrong direction here. Imo the government’s behavior, which I don’t think is quite as egregious as you’re making it out to be, is primarily downstream from other things (notably the interests of money). I asked that question because I don’t think that getting rid of the federal government would help people very much at all.
Post reply on HN