41–50 of 106 posts
When inequality grows, empires shrink and eventually disappear: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/feb/05/inequality-... And let's not kid ourselves. Those on top intend on staying there by growing the gap.
What do you mean?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More like, if we had a big patch of strawberries and every day I picked 100 and you picked 1000, why should I get to take yours?
Because you're cheating - I saw some Mexicans picking them for you.
I think this is particularly relevant to software developers. It's often fairly easy for us to go into contracting, or start our own business, but many developers with those opportunities (myself included) still choose to work for others. Perhaps we prefer the stability of not having to manage our own business, perhaps we like the projects a particular company is working on and lack the resources to attempt them ourselves, perhaps we want to acquire more savings before starting out on our own, perhaps we want to learn from a particular company. And even when we do start our own businesses, for some reason we still tend to prefer traditional structures over more equal structures like cooperatives, prefer structures in which people work for others.
It looks to me that QE3 was a huge part of that later uptick. its no surprise to me that if you juice the markets and inflate asset prices (mostly stock), that the richest benefit most. what was surprising to me is how bad actually making stuff did. I understand that juicing the markets might not benefit that, but it seemed as though QE3 actually hurt producing tangible things.
Exactly. The distributions looks reasonable until ~2008, when things go wonky. That coincides quite nicely with the bottom of the equities market and the subsequent bull run. Also, something seems off. The animated chart is not data for a given year, it's for the last 34 year ending in that year. Since you're averaging growth over 34 years, the only way the top percentile can go from 3% growth (over 34 years) to 5% i…
Note that a sharp rise in the curve can also be explained by bad years dropping out of the 34-year window. This would probably explain the increases in the 1%'s weath around 1992 and 2003 (1958 and 1969-70 recessions, respectively). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I think it is blatantly unfair. It's like if we had a big bad of skittles and every time I took 1 skittle, you took 10 skittles.
Except when it comes to wealth there is no limit. Ones success does not mean another's demise. If I mine for Bitcoin and make millions, who did I steal wealth from to get mine? Your Skittles analogy does not work.
It's my understanding that there is some churn in the top 1% of earners. If the economy transitioned to a place where people had big spikes and dips in their annual income, couldn't the graph look the same? Doesn't that sound like a "gig economy"? In other words, why graph income and not wealth?
> In other words, why graph income and not wealth? I think it's because people's wealth is really hard to estimate. The border between people's assets and their companies', foundations' and what not are usually blurry enough that you would get a graph that shows no insight. Although income is not a great KPI, at least there are reliable methods to figure it out, or at least make estimates with a quite acceptable prec…
Say someone could have a small business that takes off and retires after a few years with a reasonable retirement fund. This doesn't fit the mold of a hoarding 1%-er.
It seems like discouraging this kind of income spike would actually decrease social mobility.
It looks to me that QE3 was a huge part of that later uptick. its no surprise to me that if you juice the markets and inflate asset prices (mostly stock), that the richest benefit most. what was surprising to me is how bad actually making stuff did. I understand that juicing the markets might not benefit that, but it seemed as though QE3 actually hurt producing tangible things.
This article and the accompanying chart is specifically about _income_, not capital gains.
"Income is the sum of all the wages, salaries, profits, interests payments, rents, and other forms of earnings received... in a given period of time." Case, K. & Fair, R. (2007). Principles of Economics, p. 54.
If everyone gets 2x as much tomorrow as today, income inequality rises. Ask people if they would support everyone getting 2x their income tomorrow.
wait, wouldn't scaling income by a constant multiple be the same as not changing anything? Your income and expenses are both doubled. this would just kill the bank accounts of anyone holding cash.
Real title was, 'Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart'. Despite some of the recent coverage, this chart indicates that gains are not going to the top 20%: they are going to top 1%, and particularly To be clear, this is not many programmers: "In 1980, the top 1% of adult earners in the U.S. made $420,000 a year, on average (before taxes and measured in 2014 dollars) — 27 times as much as the average for the bottom…
Any investor can make 4-6% annual gains in the stock market year over year. I don't think that says much about inequality as a whole.