[flagged]
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
201–210 of 606 posts
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#202When I was at uni I read Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century", and parts of his newer "Capital and Ideology" (although I never quite got through that one).
The big takeaway for me was that wealth inequality never improves without some major catastrophe (war, revolution, plague etc). The proposed model is really intuitive and compelling (tldr; return on capital has historically always been higher than real growth, which guarantees indefinite concentration of wealth until there's a crisis).
Last year's Nobel Economics Prize winners, Acemoglu and Robinson, tell a similar story in "Why Nations Fail", which I am working through at the moment. Although in their case, they seem be suggesting a more causal link between erosion of political and economic institutions and the collapse of empires.
I wish these ideas were more broadly accessible and understood. The real risk of total societal collapse should transcend any partisan fighting about ideal tax rates, government inflation/unemployment targets etc. Everyone has a common interest in there not being a violent upheaval (arguably the rich most of all).
Last I checked the numbers, current wealth inequality seems about as bad as it was before the great depression. And its not enough to just say "well, absolute wealth is more important". As others have pointed out, its not stable to have such huge relative wealth disparities. And that's before you even consider corruption.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#203Top 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.
Fair point.
It's just we often see these "outrageous" statistics without perspective.
What has it been historically?
Are we still better off than soviet Russia?
It so easily becomes: capitalism = bad.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> The US has been an unequal place all its history and it's a tremendous country to live in. Have you.. lived in other countries? I came here from southeast Asia and yes, my BigTech salary affords me a comfortable life, but I simply don't understand why the bottom 90% aren't up in arms over here.
Because they’re ignorant of what’s out there. Being poor in America probably sucks more than in third world countries where there is atleast fellowship and shared reality of the masses.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#205And how much of that is owners of tech companies that they founded? The US economy depends on those tech companies: try succeeding in a country that only has old school businesses: I remember the top stocks for France are terrifyingly old. I'm in New Zealand and we hardly have any tech stocks. Xero, RocketLabs? We often sell our successes overseas. Edit: many of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americ…
Tech isn't the world. In fact if anything tech as an industry is performing awfully for us people. Lay offs lay offs for years
Tech as an investment has been doing well, and that's what he is talking about. The labor market is something else. I expect a tech crash eventually that will nuke the stock market, but good luck predicting it.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only complexity per se, I'm firmly on the camp of Byung-Chul Han's take on the lack of unifying narratives in the contemporary age. Living through the information age I do subscribe to his views of information being only additive, incapable and incomplete to form overarching narratives for us to hinge on. Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently…
It’s possibly a clear strategy (“flood the zone”) by some people to cause the conflict and confusion. I read recently a comment that in media “sex used to sell but now rage and outrage are more effective”. Start the fire and exploit the situation for their own benefit. So many people outraged but very few offering any context or insightful suggestions. Assisted by social media insane demand for controversy and disput…
I think it can be both, a strategy but also an emerging property of social media. In "In the Swarm" he talks exactly about the outrage-driven engagement when calling it out as "shitstorm":
> "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication."
This phenomenon, he states, is also a cause for the lack of proper politicking in the era of digital communication, since everyone can participate in a fleeting "shitstorm" there's no lingering narrative to keep the discourse on, internalise it, and enact change; people just move from shitstorm to shitstorm, each outrage is very ephemeral, and shit-flinging cannot enact any change or deeper discourse about the root causes that caused said shitstorm. Again, information is just additive and leaves no space for closing back on itself in a more general concept to be discussed about.
The "flood the zone" strategy seems to just attach itself to this quality of digital communication, using the ephemeral, narrativeless information to continuously drive an agenda, moving our attention into an ethereal moving target, we never get any sense of closure.
> "Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#207Earlier 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…
Because the wealth is unequal, sure, but look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago. What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained? Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.
> the wealth is unequal, sure
Do you really understand just how unequal it is? Most Americans vastly underestimate it [0]. And that's from 2013; inequality has rapidly worsened since. Do you understand the effects of that inequality?
> look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago.
I don't think this is true.
There is quality of life in owning a house, a family house. There is quality of life in having job security. There is quality of life in feeling safe letting your kids go outside in an urban environment. There is quality of life in not having record proportions of your populace behind bars. There is quality of life in being able to weather illness without filing for medical bankruptcy. There is quality of life in being able to support a family with an average wage. Etc.
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20191016221950/http://www.people...
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#208I 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…
I highly recommend taking a dynamical systems class, if you ever get the chance. It's shocking how many seemingly unrelated things just "make sense" when you know what a limit cycle is and how bifurcations work.
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#209When I was at uni I read Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century", and parts of his newer "Capital and Ideology" (although I never quite got through that one). The big takeaway for me was that wealth inequality never improves without some major catastrophe (war, revolution, plague etc). The proposed model is really intuitive and compelling (tldr; return on capital has historically always been higher than real g…
The book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" by Walter Scheidel makes a similar argument:
> Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...
Re: The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks
#210This guys has been saying this for ages