The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

It's important for petit bourgeois and wealthy skilled workers to understand their position in the class hierarchy, but calling a class whose power is dwarfed by the capitalist class an aristocracy is fluffy rhetoric.

I believe that the term 9.9% is a slogan though.

What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income.

Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless.

You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but since I AM NOT AT THE TOP, YOU CANNOT BLAME ME, so blame the richest". This is the core problem about stretching inequality, because individualism makes people work for their own selves, and NEVER encourage anyone to "take one for the team". The whole story is about how people perceives their own selves. This is an important debate.

I'm sure those 9.9% would be very surprised they belong to the top 10%. The graph of income is always growing exponentially, yet for some reason people are throwing away the idea that they might be the ones to blame, because people will naturally find argument that they're not to blame. It's always the responsibility of someone else.

I personally have not lived the wealthiest life there is in term of income, but you know, at least I don't complain, because when I compare it to the rest of the world, being in the lower 50% or 60% or 30% in a modern and developed country is still a pretty good life.

I doubt this particular point. The 98th percentile of earners make something like $200-$300k a year, the 89th percentile make about $100k/year[0]. That's a big difference, and it will equate to an even bigger difference in wealth, but not enough that the 98th percentile will substantially outweigh the combined 89th-97th percentiles. (Arguing otherwise means assuming that the one group has 8 times as much wealth per capita as the other).

It's also true that the 98th percentile includes plenty of people in the HN crowd. That's the point: well paid professional types (or software engineers) are not being hurt by the gains that accrue to the very top of the income distribution.

So far as they/we cluster in the same industries/subsectors that are growing those billionaires, we have--to some extent--shared interests. For instance, Amazon software engineers might gain by clawing back money from Bezos and the stockholders, but they don't have a monetary interest in redirecting pay to the warehouse workers.

[0] immediate googled source: https://investormint.com/investing/how-much-does-the-top-1-m...

I always thought the 99th percentile started a bit higher, but this is roughly in line with what I've read before.

It's a arbitrary, but it's also useful to have a cutoff point. And due to power laws, as you observed, falling below that is already too low.

I wonder who paid Matthew Stewart, an Oxford-educated management consultant for "large financial institutions,"[1] to write such an article.

[1] http://mwstewart.com/about/

The government holds most of the wealth.

“He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees. According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution. Stewart’s “9.9 percent” includes a lot of working professionals and business owners with gilded academic résumés, sure. But it also probably encompasses a lot of 75-year-old former accountants and nurses and guys with construction businesses who made a comfortable living decades ago, bought a house, and paid down the mortgage while saving for retirement. There’s no real way to tell a consistent story about who these people are, which makes it a bit hard to blame them for the death of opportunity in this country.”

I don't think the rebuttal makes a fair characterization of Stewart's article. Slate's argument comes down to "Stewart is taking his eyes off the prize, asking us to focus on the 9.9% when the 1% are really the problem" but I didn't interpret the Atlantic piece as implying that those at the very top are innocent in all this. It was more saying that the upper class (9.9%) have been complicit as the top 0.1% have garnered an increasingly vast portion of wealth.

Stewart is asking those in the 9.9% to be more cognizant of those below them, to stop looking up at the 0.1% and realize that the actions they take to improve the outcomes for their children are reducing income mobility.

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No, the article states that the average wealth of the 9.9% is 1.2m. This is of course heavily influenced by people at in the top 1%; people in the 10th percentile are not all millionaires.

Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents / divorced / never married

And therein lies the disconnect: both can be true, because one of them is a tautology; and it just so happens that relative disparities in wealth among the pool of people in market for a service will cause the competition to attain some elements of an auction, and cause the poorer parties to lose out.

I personally wish that instead of printing money to buy stocks and bonds, they had enacted something like UBI instead. Give the money you're printing to people who need it. I think it's actually better for a capitalist economy, because then corporations still need to compete to get that money from consumers, instead of just being bailed out, which rewards failing corporations.

And I agree, it's a stupid core idea.

You could just as easily set the line at the top 1/3, because that group in the US is better off than any top 1/3 in any other nation. The US controls ~35% of all wealth on earth, with 4% of the population; that wealth is almost all stacked among the top ~85 million adults - a bit more than 1% of the world's population. Among those 85 million adults, there are over 11 million millionaires [1]. Nothing like that mass affluence exists anywhere else. So if you really wanted to push the class warfare game to its inevitable conclusion, you'd pit the majority bottom 2/3 against the minority top 1/3. If you were a nefarious type, this also works particularly well because it pits whites & asians against blacks & hispanics, as those groups largely divide by those income/wealth lines.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans...

Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?

Interestingly, some estimates of (formal) Polish aristocracy in the 17th century place it around 10% of the population. Maybe this is just some natural distribution of socio-econo-political status of human groups.

> In 2016, white families had the highest level of both median and mean family wealth: $171,000 and $933,700, respectively (figure 1). Black and Hispanic families have considerably less wealth than white families. Black families' median and mean net worth is less than 15 percent that of white families, at $17,600 and $138,200, respectively. Hispanic families' median and mean net worth was $20,700 and $191,200, respectively.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/rece...

Eh, I feel that was done more by the increased focus on social issues and race/gender/whatever tensions to be honest. Isn't it super convenient that all these identity politics wars came about JUST after Occupy and the possibility the rich were going to be in the firing line? Or that class usually isn't mentioned there?

For the last two decades, your source actually says the opposite. The lowest three quintiles peaked in the dot-com bubble, with the bottom quintile losing the most (almost 10%) and only the middle quintile just recently reaching those levels again.

Actually the article has a fairly conservative vantage. As the pie is not what is significant. The wealth and money and pie have little significance. What matters is the expropriation of surplus labor time, by the heir, from the one who works. It is a social relationship, expropriating the worker's time. The pie, the wealth, the product is not what has significance here.

If you're rich, you're rich. It makes no difference if that wealth is tied up in illiquid assets. If the precarity if your financial situation is based on the fact that you're worth millions but have decided for some reason to leave it invested in one large, volatile asset, then you don't get to claim you're in the same boat as someone who is pawning their wedding ring until payday to make rent.

Being rich but poorly invested (90% of your net worth is in your home equity) is a decision you made, not a situation you found yourself born into.

If a bear feels called to a particular vocation, that vocation is equally respected whether it is ditch-digger or administrator (which is just another job). If no bear feels called to a particular community need then the bears perform that job on a rotating basis. The story didn't describe what would happen if a lot of bears felt called to a particular job, but I presume there would just be very little work for any of them to do in that job, and that most of their time would be spent on the "community jobs".

Unfortunately, we're heading toward the end of this era. Without some kind of miracle (this isn't totally unlikely, but we can't exactly count on it), we will have to either dramatically lower our average standard of living, or reduce our population, in order not to totally overwhelm the planet's carrying capacity and therefore die out totally. Most likely, we'll need to do a bit of each.

The trouble is that it's hard to get most people behind a plan that says, basically "We are reducing everyone's standard of living, including those of you making $1/day and those of you making $100,000 a minute. We all have to do our part."

A still-difficult but much easier sell is "We're reducing inequality by giving some of us a hand up, and the richest of us are going to pitch in to help. We can't all live like Trump or the Sultan of Brunei but we can all be free from want without destroying the planet or suffering any mass-genocides."

The easiest sell of all is "We can all be rich and live like modern-day Americans for eternity! All we need to do is de-regulate all of these job-creating, wealth-producing industries and boom! Invisible hand!" But that's a lie.

Unfortunately, the easiest sell is the one that gets sold, but that's not to say that the middle one isn't something we can shoot for when the Plan A status quo becomes coming apart at the seams. Whether that will be too late remains to be seen.

It would be a vast improvement over the status quo, where most people are either working class or underclass.

> We should focus on the very bottom, not the very top.

They aren't separate issues, they are aspects of the same issue.

I would argue that both issues are worth looking at.

'All of the struggle in life comes from the fact of not being able to stay quiet in a room for a long time'.

Heirs live in luxury without need of work because what used to be called the reserve army of labor is used as a bulwark against those working, which in cause generates those profits. Wealth created by those who work, expropriated by heirs who do not work. So, as I said, the top is predicated on the existence of the bottom.

This is patently not true. We overthrew kings, introduced democracy, and eliminated slavery. Every time we have made people more equal, our society has become more open and less morally repugnant.

Trying to be the winner of class competition is vulgar Marxism. You don't need so many things to be happy in life, nor do you need to dominate others. You merely need your life essentials, freedom of movement, friends, family, and meaningful work. None of those things require domination.

Obviously everyone will lead a different life, but you don't need to suck up resources like a black hole to do so.