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

391–400 of 606 posts

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

#391

Post by ahaferburg »

jonplackett wrote: post #210

This guys has been saying this for ages https://m.youtube.com/garyseconomics

I am taking a deep dive into inequality thanks to Gary Stevenson. He has a lot of educational videos on his channel. Highly recommended.

Here's how I would sum up his main argument: Ordinary people have less money and can no longer afford to buy property. Governments have less money, infrastructure everywhere is eroding. So where does all the wealth go? The only possible answer is to the very rich, who are doing better than ever, while everyone else is down financially.

To be clear, this is not about the entrepreneur who made a couple million bucks and has three houses. It's about the top 0.1 % who are sucking everyone else dry, permanently: The poor, the middle class, and the government.

We need to do something to reverse this trend. And soon.

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

#392

Post by tonyhart7 »

jgilias wrote: post #274
ThinkBeat wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revolutions can happen if enough people show up. Massive amounts of people are difficult to deal with. Smaller groups you can outright kill in daylight, but better to get to them first to torture and kill them out of sight. Once you need to kill 500.000 who are protesting and if violence to quell the hoards wakes up more people who want to see the regime fail.

The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime. Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off. If the Britis…

" half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded."

tbh British empire at that time still has Canada,India,Australia and not counting 'small size' territory they has, Yes they can supress American Revolt absolutely but it would be a burden and not cost effective at the same time. colonies is bussiness after all

if they can't produce wealth then why fought so hard to defend this land???

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

#393

Post by keernan »

renewiltord wrote: post #42
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.

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 type of inequality being discussed is very different from 'keeping up with the Jones' that you are discussing.

Historically, one of the major turning points in the cycles of society/governments is when there is massive inequitable distribution of wealth such that the masses are left to divvy up a tiny piece of the pie while the top .05% hoard 80+% of the wealth. IMO we are currently seeing the wealthiest people on earth taking over the levers of the US government and it is unlikely we will ever return to the constitutional democracy we used to have. Moving forward Elon Musk and the other members of his Gothic MAGA will decide how much the government can spend each year and on what and for whose benefit.

A very, very different scenario than being envious of the sports car in your neighbor's driveway.

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

#394

Post by pydry »

Earw0rm wrote: post #186
iLoveOncall wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article also uses income... Anyway, if anything the distribution based on wealth would even more starkly be hyper-focused at the top, the people in the 10-9% range aren't exactly sitting on mountains of gold.

90th percentile 21-year-old has nothing. With college debt their assets are net negative. 90th percentile 65 year old has perhaps $1M+ in accumulated property wealth and retirement savings. There is some generational inequality at work, but that 65 year old also had ~zero at 21. The 90th percentile 21 year old will likely be doing very well by the time they're 65, hard to say whether better or worse than today's coho…

Some of those 90th percentile 21 year olds genuinely have nothing while others are in line to receive a bumper payday when their parents die.

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

#395

Post by bawolff »

mandmandam wrote: post #188
bawolff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a socital stability point of view, i think it still matters. Too much inequality (especially when combined with lack of class mobility) leads to class resentment which is bad for sociatal stability. Humans get jealous even if their wealth increased in absolute terms.

As true and important as that it, there are more harmful and more direct effects wrapped up with our record inequality than jealousy and resentment, or even hate; like the capture of our political system.* And most Americans have no idea how unequal wealth distribution really is, which means that those emotions are being easily redirected onto vulnerable groups by the people actually responsible for the gross inequal…

> * See, for example, the vast gulf between public opinion on issues like Israel, public healthcare, free education and housing for all, vs the opinion of the political and media class.

While i agree with you generally (blaming domestic problems on unpopular minorities or foreign enemies is a playbook as old as time), im not sure i agree that those issues are based on class division. Large swathes of America seem to be genuinely opposed to public healthcare. As a non american it boggles my mind, but it seems pretty clear that a significant portion dont want that for whatever reason (i would say that similarly those other issues don't follow class divides all that much either)

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

#396

Post by matwood »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #327
matwood wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side. Not saying it will turn out differently, but there are more guns circulating in the US than there are people. Nearly everyone has or can easily get access to a gun. US culture is also quite a bit different, celebrating violence, don't tread on me, etc... Again, it might not make a difference, but I'm not sure those other situations are compar…

If it actually does come to a new civil war, my money is still on whoever owns most of the military. Small arms are nice and well, but they don't help you a lot when the other guy has got APCs and tanks.

I think it would be an open question as to which side ends up owning most of the military. Bases are all over the US along with national guard. The people in the military are also a pretty diverse group. In a civil war situation I don’t think it would be an automatic siding with DC.

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

#397

Post by Johanx64 »

fxwin wrote: post #306
Johanx64 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In any kind of non-uniform distribution of any good Not in any kind. It is absolutely the case, if there's mostly untaxed generational wealth transfer. Imagine this - you are born in this world with nothing. And every parcel of land and property is owned by somebody - somebody who with high likelihood inherited it or hundreds of millions or billions of assets on spawn. Now obviously, you can inherit all sorts of oth…

That statement had nothing to do with taxes or inheritance (or any specific financial process in fact). It was simply a (admittedly rather reductive) mathematical statement, which remains true independently of the nature of the underlying good. My point was that pointing out "Top x% own Top x+y% of good z" doesn't say anything meaningful without contextualizing why (if) this is a bad thing, and what x and y should be…

Saying "non-uniform distribution" doesn't actually purvey any insight or mathematical "truth" and reveals almost nothing about the actual distribution - other than stating that it's non-uniform (well, duh!).

What you are doing - in essence - is making it sound like gigantic economic inequalities and wealth concentrations in hands of few families are some underlying, unavoidable fact of universe.

While in reality they are - largely - a result of unlimited, largely untaxed generational wealth transfer. And outcomes of other similar policies.

>My point was that pointing out "Top x% own Top x+y% of good z" doesn't say anything meaningful

No, it does. It shows just how grossly wealth is increasingly captured by a small amount of people. Depending on what those x, y and z, you can gauge the actual shape of the "non-uniform distribution" and how it changes over time. Which is exactly the point.

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

#398

Post by phkx »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #224
raziel2p wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do they? can you give some examples?

Think what your priorities were when you were 15, 20, 25, 30 and so on. Personally for me, my priorities have been different at each stage. As I got older, I had more things to lose, loved ones to think about, deeper connections and etc., which made me more mindful while making specific decisions. I’m not saying that at the age of 30 (current global median age), every one of the same age think the same way. But it is…

I don‘t get which implications you derive from the changing needs over one’s life.

In all of those phases, safety and health of yourself and beloved ones are likely at the top of your needs. Is there a contradiction to your ideals when you were young (unless you went all in on YOLO)?

edit: Maybe it’s about the inclination towards uprise/revolution which might result in oppression and danger for those you want to protect. In that case: I don’t see why some kind of apocalyptic revolution must be part of the cycle mentioned in the top post. Maybe I’m still naive, but I still have hopes that we will get to sustainable terms on this planet.

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

#399

Post by jgilias »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #392
jgilias wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime. Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off. If the Britis…

" half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded." tbh British empire at that time still has Canada,India,Australia and not counting 'small size' territory they has, Yes they can supress American Revolt absolutely but it would be a burden and not cost effective at the same time. colonies is bussiness after all if they can't produce wealth then why fought so hard to defend th…

What I meant was that they wouldn’t need to suppress much. They’d just AML the leaders of the independence movement to poverty.

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

#400

Post by InDubioProRubio »

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…

What is a world war- then a flaring off of revolution. Send the peasants to fight somewhere, buy another 30 years of stability aka a generation of peace from the wheel of strife for the price of sacrificing all the people popping up everywhere.
Post reply on HN