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The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

theatlantic.com

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#121

Post by roywiggins »

reggieband wrote: post #108

This was a very long article so it doesn't surprise me that most people are commenting on the 9.9% figure while missing the authors point. I've seen a similar point made several times recently and it goes something like this: The "true elites" have constructed a social and economic system that syphons off the majority of wealth. The "wannabe elites" at the top of the remaining pile are actually complicit servants of…

This tripartite split (elite, bourgeois, poor) is a very old one. I am sure I read a paper in an undergrad poly-sci course that analyzed the fate of nations based on which two teamed up against the third. Elites+poor is a pretty dangerous combination because they end up catching civil society in the pincers.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#122

Post by roywiggins »

bhawks wrote: post #117
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that is a fair rebuttal. There has been a systemic transfer of wealth from the young to the older. Social Security and pensions get funded; universities and schools do not.

Citation needed? Education is the 2nd largest expenditure in California: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_CA_statel... Number 1 expenditure in Texas: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_TX_statel... People perceive education to be underfunded, but digging at the data it definitely is one of the Government's highest spending priorities...

Student loan growth is arguably a decent proxy. Entire generations coming out of school with negative wealth is a pretty new thing.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#123

Post by roywiggins »

dgreensp wrote: post #11

Wait, so 10% of the county is millionaires (more or less, if 9.9% are 1.2-millionaires), and these people have such “good family, good health, and good jobs” that they might as well be a different species? If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? I think the author’s intent was to acknowledge privilege, but the article is just making more weird caricatu…

The correlation doesn't have to be exact to have explanatory power. It's much easier to be healthy and stable if you're in the 9.9%, and if you are, the odds that you're in that bucket is higher than if you're not.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#124

Post by the_gastropod »

zjaffee wrote: post #105
stagger87 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly 40% of households have an income between 35k and 100k. This makes your statement that "there is hardly a middle class" absurdly wrong.

The broader point I'm getting at is that the middle class historically didn't struggle in the way they do now. They used to be able to afford homes, vacations, college, and now that is only available to the upper middle class.

Homes today are roughly twice the size they were in the 1970s [1]. Despite that, home ownership rates are higher than they were in the '70s [2]. More people today have college educations in the U.S. than any time in U.S. history [3]. I'm not fond of the rhetoric about the poor middle class. There are issues we need to solve w/r/t poor economic mobility. We should be focusing our attention more on solving those problems, and less on complaining about things that aren't true.

[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#125

Post by bhawks »

roywiggins wrote: post #122
bhawks wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed? Education is the 2nd largest expenditure in California: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_CA_statel... Number 1 expenditure in Texas: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_TX_statel... People perceive education to be underfunded, but digging at the data it definitely is one of the Government's highest spending priorities...

Student loan growth is arguably a decent proxy. Entire generations coming out of school with negative wealth is a pretty new thing.

Does this amount to a systemic transfer of wealth from young to old (OP's complaint?)?

Student loan growth correlates to the (seemingly unbounded) rise of college costs, along with the willingness of the Government to back loans for them?

I'd argue that college costs are rising specifically because it's so easy for students to get loans because of Government intervention. :(

Also to be considered is that it used to be the case that entire generations did not go to college (in fact we're only at 30% of folks now...).

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#126

Post by Areading314 »

dahauns wrote: post #43
Areading314 wrote: post #31

"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below" The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been "transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this: https://www.advisorperspect…

"The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate." For the last two decades, your source actually says the opposite. The lowest three quintiles peaked in the dot-com bubble, with the bottom quintile losing the most (almost 10%) and only the middle quintile just recently reaching those levels again.

Agreed, I meant over time as in over the last century. Interesting that the 90s was this much of a peak though!

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#127

Post by Areading314 »

imbokodo wrote: post #47
Areading314 wrote: post #31

"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below" The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been "transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this: https://www.advisorperspect…

As all wealth that can be created comes from work, and as the heirs who mostly make up the 0.1% do not work, it follows that the wealth comes from those below. Actually the article has a fairly conservative vantage. As the pie is not what is significant. The wealth and money and pie have little significance. What matters is the expropriation of surplus labor time, by the heir, from the one who works. It is a social r…

Wealth does not come from work alone. It's possible to work very hard in ways that create no wealth or vice versa. It's just one component in addition to multipliers like knowledge, tools and capital.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#128

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bhawks wrote: post #125
roywiggins wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student loan growth is arguably a decent proxy. Entire generations coming out of school with negative wealth is a pretty new thing.

Does this amount to a systemic transfer of wealth from young to old (OP's complaint?)? Student loan growth correlates to the (seemingly unbounded) rise of college costs, along with the willingness of the Government to back loans for them? I'd argue that college costs are rising specifically because it's so easy for students to get loans because of Government intervention. :( Also to be considered is that it used to b…

One still has a generation who were educated on subsidised education now reducing those subsidies, per capita, to the next. The former then expects the latter to work to fund their Social Security, Medicare and pensions as opposed to working to redistribute those hand-outs over the broader population. (Not taking a stance. Simply eliding a policy theme. My bet is SS, Medicare and pensions will be dismantled within a few cycles to fund a UBI and universal healthcare, with total pay-outs to seniors going down to pay for broader pay-outs across the population.)

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#129

Post by almostApatriot1 »

sologoub wrote: post #45
p49k wrote: post #8

Rebuttal from Slate: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-...

Key paragraph: “He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees. According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution. Stewart’s “9.9 percent” inc…

what's so key about that? I and many others know that the Baby Boomers hoarded wealth to create their own class that is very hard to enter into. You can certainly 'blame' them when it comes to things like Prop 13 and their inability to protect social security for future generations.

Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

#130

Post by seibelj »

Latteland wrote: post #96
seibelj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to forcibly do anything. I want to unshackle market forces to solve the problem in a better way. Don’t ban poor people from your town. Don’t create a monopoly on local education. The rules should forcibly ensure competition rather than forcibly control how people live and get educated.

In US, each school district receives money proportional to their students, with some places raising money via levys or bonds in their district. It takes a long time to make new schools. If people could go to any school, you'd overwhelm some districts with tons of students and you can't just make a new school in a year or two, it takes a lot of time for the district to figure out they'll need one long term, raise the…

OK, so build low-income housing in rich districts (unless you are saying the presence of poor kids destroys the good school) and stop using zoning to limit what kinds of residences can be built (lot-size, multi-family, building height, etc.). In the suburb of Saint Louis where my wife grew up, each lot had to be at least 1 acre, and had to be single-family. Given how expensive it was to live there, realistically the only properties that were profitable to build were McMansions. Amazing school district though!
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