The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by quacksilver » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

ahaferburg wrote: post #414

timewizard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. It seems like a symptom. Primarily because "wealth management" does seem to be a skill. So the expectation would be that even if you equalized all wealth tomorrow and suddenly educated everyone to the same level in it's management then in a very short time a large imbalance would again be created. > but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, It's imposs…

> in a very short time Citation needed. This seems highly implausible. Wealth is mostly inherited, and amassed over generations. The wealthy become more wealthy because they already have wealth. If you take that away, all those wealth management skills matter a lot less.

Lots of rich people become poor as well, maybe its just that few people see a celebrity or multimillionaire going bankrupt and disappearing from the public view or their decedents blowing their inherited money on designer goods, cars, gambling alcohol or an expensive spouse who loves them for their money as particularly notable.

"from rags to rags in three generations" etc...

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

#442

Post by hagbarth » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:46 PM UTC

keernan wrote: post #405

hagbarth wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher top marginal income tax rate (was much higher in the 50s, 60s, 70s). Higher capital gains tax. And then use the income from that to distribute wealth through things like single payer health care, affordable housing etc. So the basic needed expenses don't take up such a large portion of the budget for middle income households. Also: stronger unions.

Anyone with 100 million dollars or more does not have an income (unless they decide for their own reasons to voluntarily have one; but we will ignore that for the moment). Who do you think makes the decision regarding the way the government will collect its money? Ans: The people with 100 million dollars or more. They pay to elect their Senator and Congressional Rep who will create the laws they are instructed to cre…

Yes, you have described one of the issues with unfettered capitalism.

Lobbying should be illegal. All political donations should be capped at a reasonable level and should only be able to be done personally.

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

#443

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

daedrdev wrote: post #36

The share of wealth held by the 1% in the US has been constant for a decade, at 30%. You can argue thats a problem, but it has not been getting worse. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

[deleted]

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

#444

Post by sharemywin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:51 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #425

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem likely to me as I don't see how someone can get to be that rich without being incredibly motivated by more money. Surely a normal person would get a few million and decide that they had more money than they'd ever need? But yes, likely motivated by power too.

Money and power are the same thing.

only in a corrupt system.

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

#445

Post by ninetyninenine » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

actionfromafar wrote: post #155

wesapien wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memecoin stuff is just chefs kiss. Now he wants to impose tarrifs while not having the local production capacity. The citizens will pay for that. The rich will get the tax cuts and funding while everyone else will get austerity and be required to pull up your bootstraps.

Then, you can always blame the libtards and the Bidens harder .

It’s not about liberals or conservatives.

When a poor person votes for a ultra rich person that it is completely against the poor persons self interest because the rich person will make policy to favor himself as a rich person rather then others as poor people.

I hate extremist liberalism too and this is completely orthogonal to that.

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

#446

Post by fxwin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

Johanx64 wrote: post #397

fxwin wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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!).

I'm not sure if you're aware, but you're arguing my point. Without contextualizing the numbers, the headline tells us only that not everybody has the same amount of X.

> It shows just how grossly wealth is increasingly captured by a small amount of people.

The sloganeering and lack of explaining which numbers qualify as "gross" and which as acceptible and worth striving for under headlines like this is precisely what I'm criticizing. Is it still gross inequality if the top 10% own 60% of wealth? 50%? 20%?

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

#447

Post by sharemywin » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

weatherlite wrote: post #200

raziel2p wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

if the government had a sovereign wealth fund it could have bought all the failing companies and "divested" when the market recovered. instead of being massively in debt it could have probably come out on top. granted that incentivizes the government to cause market crashes but there no perfect system.

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

#448

Post by from-nibly » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

weatherlite wrote: post #200

raziel2p wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

That would massively slow the economy and the people at the top will never do that.

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

#449

Post by demaga » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

Mandelmus wrote: post #209

angusturner wrote: post #202

When 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 tha…

I would also recommend "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It explores "the roots" of inequality. A lot of interesting insights there.

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

#450

Post by Hikikomori » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #220

wesapien wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laborer coordination and workforce strikes.

How very Marxist. How have those Marxist governments fared in the past?

Slightest pushback on free market capitalism == soviet union, how very republican of you.