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

541–550 of 606 posts

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

#541

Post by mlrtime »

mandmandam wrote: post #402
gonzobonzo wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that because they're older? Honest question, but do you know much about investing? The investment curve isn't linear. Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30 [1]. Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3]. If you have…

> Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30. What part of that justifies or explains away record inequality? > Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3]. Hm - might that be because they live with their parents and can't affor…

The thread topic is inequality doesn't matter as much as lifting QOL for all income levels. The delta isn't important.

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

#542

Post by philipov »

dpc050505 wrote: post #540
philipov wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's the primary reason that Britain lost the war. The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning. It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to t…

The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.

That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did.

Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.

Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.

Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.

Or any number of other scenarios.

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

#543

Post by mandmandam »

mlrtime wrote: post #541
mandmandam wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30. What part of that justifies or explains away record inequality? > Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3]. Hm - might that be because they live with their parents and can't affor…

The thread topic is inequality doesn't matter as much as lifting QOL for all income levels. The delta isn't important.

Quality of life is about to take a very hard hit, directly because of the level of inequality [0].

You can't separate these things and expect the world to make sense. When the ultra-wealthy capture too much of the levers of power, and strip-mine all our potential just to get a bit more in a bid for total control, quality of life for humanity suffers.

We've been suffering for it, as I explained above, and we're going to see a lot more of the same. House prices could double in the next 5 years. Even if you own a house or 6 and think that's just great, society will suffer and quality of life will fall.

You might think that owning houses, starting families, clean water, living oceans, a habitable biosphere and healthy division of power don't affect quality of life, but I promise you, they do. And those things are suffering, because of the level of inequality we have reached.

... Let's say, being generous and ignoring a lot of negative externalities, that we actually have improved average quality of life by 10% over the last 50 years. Put that in context - productivity has doubled. Where did all the difference go? ... And what are the beneficiaries of this wealth doing with that money?

The level of inequality is huge, and rising rapidly. That comes with a very serious level of existential threat to life on Earth itself; not just its quality.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc&t=1s

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

#544

Post by mlrtime »

Almondsetat wrote: post #297
prasadjoglekar wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid money is only good if the bank stays solvent. Which SVB was not, and neither were many banks in 2008 until the federal govt stepped in and backstopped all deposits beyond the $250K limit.

Rich people use different banks than the general population

How are you defining rich here? All these discussions people throw out relative terms and we all have different numbers in our heads. However when Democrats propose bills they start at ~$400k for W2 workers. This is not rich in NYC/SF, and these people use regular banks.

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

#545

Post by ozim »

ryandrake wrote: post #486
ozim wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absurd. Inequality doesn’t matter really nowadays. There will be no revolution as most of people are out of poverty despite what narration on the internet is. Living conditions as today day poor person are immensely better than 18 or 19th century peasants. Whoever has billions does not affect me having running water in faucets and me enjoying life. Warm water is not all there is to life but it is a lot.

> Whoever has billions does not affect me having running water in faucets and me enjoying life. Whether or not people are in subsistence poverty is not the only measure of a functioning society. It's great that extreme poverty is going down, but let's not declare Mission Accomplished just yet. The existence of billionaires might not affect your running water, but it does distort the market and negatively affect how m…

The U.S. holds the top spot with 813 billionaires - there are 340 Million people in the US - I don't think their mere existence has any impact on weather my local grocery sells more expensive bread or tomatoes.

I think people should stop fetishizing billionaires one way or the other.

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

#546

Post by robocat »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #205
ulfw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tech stocks are the market now. If you bought Nasdaq before, at peak or after dotcom bust, then you had to wait 15 years to "break even". If you bet against tech stocks (e.g. buy S&P500) then you're down.

It is historically risky to bet against the US stock market.

https://infogram.com/all-recessions-1h7v4pw0g7jxj6k

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

#547

Post by mlrtime »

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…

Wealth is not zero sum

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

#548

Post by ninetyninenine »

mlrtime wrote: post #539
ninetyninenine wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if you’re rich I’m not referring to you. I’m referring to poor people who voted for trump. Also I’m not referring to people who voted for the lesser of two evils.

I can't believe that people still parrot this take. This is exactly why Democrats lose, the attitude that "we know whats best for you" will always lose. You should just stop it.

I’m not a democrat

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

#549

Post by esseph »

esseph wrote: post #506
sigmoid10 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's always the people who have never fought in a war that say things like this. APCs take fuel, require men to run, and need tires or tracks. For $10 worth of chemicals or a little bit of camouflage and some earth work you can make the APC irrelevant very quickly. Happened in Iraq all the time. The US military and its members have spent almost 25 years fighting through insurgencies. There are millions of combat vets…

(If you spend a lot of time learning to fight against an insurgency, you also spend a lot of time learning how to wage one against a technologically superior force.)

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

#550

Post by _DeadFred_ »

boelboel wrote: post #273
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.

Higher marginal income taxes discourage investment and productivity and high capital gains causes high distortion/is difficult to implement/also discourage investment. Affordable housing shouldn't be tried to be solved by throwing money at it (subsidizing demand), the real way is to cause the supply to go up by laxer zoning and less restrictions. Inheritance taxes could also be used to 'level' the playing without cau…

Oh no, what will will America do without the added productivity that is stock buybacks and firing workers for a temporary stock bump?
Post reply on HN