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The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

awealthofcommonsense.com

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

#191

Post by yuppiepuppie »

kvgr wrote: post #171

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.

While this may be a jarring response to many, I dont find this response to be far off from my reality.

My father is compulsive about accumulating wealth via stocks, property, etc.

My father in law could not care less about wealth accumulation, and would rather have lunch with friends outside of work.

I dont know who is happiest, but from the outside they both appear very content and satisfied.

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

#192

Post by wqaatwt »

hnfong wrote: post #172
wqaatwt wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as directly comparing Musk and George Washington. But I suppose there are some parallels [if we take the more cynical] perspective. Both were willing to take on significant risk to upend the established socio-economic order primarily for the benefit of their respective social classes (wealthy landholders and tech-oligarchs).

But yes, confiscation of all his property and even the gallows (fortunately or unfortunately for everyone else) is not a risk Musk is facing yet.

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

#193

Post by kleiba »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #120
weatherlite wrote: post #4

So 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.

> Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible. At least in Finland today it's much easier for young people to buy their 1st home now compared to 15 years ago. Interest rates are roughly where they were 15 years ago, but house prices in real terms have gone way down. There's also huge market asymmetry with large amount of vacant properties that nobody wants to buy, and relatively…

That's great to hear for young Fins - other countries, unfortunately, are not as lucky when it comes to the price developments of real estate over the last 15 years.

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

#194

Post by kqr »

Surely this must be to some degree influenced by the prevalence of ETFs that give small-scale investors access to diversification, at the cost of no direct ownership for the small-scale investor?

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

#195

Post by awei »

raziel2p wrote: post #180
awei wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .. 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.

Agreed. Let's include family benefits in inheritance. What is the percentage of Billionaires that inherited/were born in wealthy families compared to the completely self - made ones, and I think we should nuance that with the time they became wealthy as it feels like many made it recently, as suggested by the fact that a new billionaire was minted every 17 hours in 2021.

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

#196

Post by mandmandam »

This is kinda misleading as to just how bad inequality is (ie, at record level and rising, with global irreversible consequences starting to hit us).

To see how bad wealth inequality in the US is, look at this graph [0] from 2023 and see if you feel any different.

0 - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-amer...

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

#197

Post by catlifeonmars »

colechristensen wrote: post #45
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…

There is always an exponential distribution of wealth, it isn’t rational to argue against it. What needs argument is what the exponent is.

Why is there an always an exponential distribution of wealth?

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

#198

Post by oldpersonintx »

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…

[dead]

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

#199

Post by wakawaka28 »

nicoburns wrote: post #127
jopsen wrote: post #102

Top 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/

Rough (not absolute) wealth equality is a goal in and of itself we want a capitalist economic system to function. Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.

>Rough (not absolute) wealth equality is a goal in and of itself we want a capitalist economic system to function.

No, it's not. Capitalism has nothing to do with equality. We can have extreme inequality as long as the workers actually get enough to satisfy them. That of course depends on many things like their productivity, supply and demand for labor, and preventing monopolistic abuses by corporations and labor.

>Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.

Wealth inequality has nothing to do with market efficiency. Every person in the market makes decisions according to their own estimations of what the true value of a thing is. That's basically a democratized hive mind at work. If any individual spots a market inefficiency, they can try to exploit it, and in so doing increase overall satisfaction of market participants. This distinguishes capitalism from other systems like communism, which rely on a small number of central planners to make necessarily imperfect decisions for everyone based on limited understanding of the entire economy and all its participants.

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

#200

Post by weatherlite »

raziel2p wrote: post #96
weatherlite wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming sarcasm here. The 2008 crash was immediately offset by huge rounds of QE that most of them went to bail out financial institutions and inadvertently further inflated the prices of most assets. It may have been necessary, I don't know, but the bottom line is the stock market (and all assets generally) was inflated with huge sums of new money.

so how does this align with your opinion/idea that a stock market crash today would reduce inequality? more likely the same thing would just happen again.

Its probably not easy but I think a policy that protects the workers instead of a policy that protects the corporations / shareholders. You can let corporations go bankrupt - thus causing shareholders to get wiped out, and compensate by protecting the workers and poorer people with government checks until they can find new employment. Banks are probably the only exception , I don't think you can let the banks fail without risking an economic collapse.
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