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Comment by anbende | Hacker News Reader

Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the much of the wealth in the 9.9 is going to actually be in that top .9.

In other words, the author just divides the top 1% into two pieces, and lumps one of them in with “the 9.9”.

Edit: I did a little research and math. The top 1% holds 40% of US wealth. The top 10% holds 77%. That’s 37% to “the 9%”. I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.

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I disagree.

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.

This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10% think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford a million dollar home, take yearly vacations, send their kids to college, ect.

The things the upper middle class think should be a given to them because they are within a certain economic strata are actually just regular luxuries.

Huh? That's entirely incorrect. There's definitely a middle class that isn't working paycheck to paycheck but can't afford million dollar homes, vacas and college for their kids.

There's also a part of that middle class who can afford vacations and college for their kids, but not million dollar homes. Even if that group is likely bigger outside of the US (since hey, college in European countries like the UK is damn cheap by comparison), it still exists over there in the US too. Neither of those things necessarily require a millionaire income.

To me the point is that "other middle class" you mention, call it lower middle class, is shrinking, falling into the lower class. Because of loss of decent paying factory jobs, retail shrinking, etc. If you are an adult today without special education, it's really hard to have a decent lifestyle. Most of my friends are programmers or teachers, and they most all of them have decent jobs. The teachers are increasingly in that lower middle class category. Software engineers are more fortunate.

> Software engineers are more fortunate.

We are, I earn significantly more than my partner who has a degree and I don't have a degree.

It's one of the last fields that without a degree you can still earn a good living if you can break into it somehow (in my case it was side gigs/contracting to crappy full time position to none-crappy full time position to decent full time position).

Though I'm in the UK, I gather the degree requirement is a harder line in the US, also worth noting that by and large university education has had no correlation with programmer ability (in business settings) in my experience, I've met good/bad with degree/without degree.

Interestingly the one correlation I have observed is how fascinating people find the field when they are children, young geeks become older geeks.

On an unrelated note, this is why I think the programs that encourage young girls to get into computing/programming are the ones with the best likely RoI in terms of re-balancing the field.

I think it used to be easier in the US to be a dev without a degree, but it's hard to get all the background to pass interviews without serious education, things like time complexity and their of computation.

You can easily learn that stuff yourself if you care to; the hardest thing is getting interviews when you don't have the work history yet.

Roughly 40% of households have an income between 35k and 100k. This makes your statement that "there is hardly a middle class" absurdly wrong.

In a given area, someone making 35k and someone making 100k have very different options at their disposal.

The broader point I'm getting at is that the middle class historically didn't struggle in the way they do now. They used to be able to afford homes, vacations, college, and now that is only available to the upper middle class.

Important to note that 'historically' here probably refers to the 4 or 5 decades following the second world war, which may well turn out to have been a historical anomaly in the grand scheme of things.

Agreed that homes and college are getting insanely expensive. But as a counterpoint, a higher % of the population own homes and go to college than in decades past (though certainly accruing higher debt than was needed before).

Simply untrue. Do not change the definition of middle class. A single-wide prefab of real lumber for a family of three costs a year of wage or two for a high school graduate. Resourceful individuals can develop land cooperatives. Vacations and college aren't strictly necessary for many, nor particularly unattainable. A road trip anywhere in the USA or continental Europe is nearly free, and a four-year degree at a State U in eight years will barely touch the discretionary income of the sort of individual who has decided to pursue that objective.

The idea of a "middle-class struggle" is confused with changing standards and lifestyles of the middle class. Certainly the regular use of jet airplanes, hotel accommodations, and full-service dining may be out of reach for some, but an urban-agrarian lifestyle with the use of a motorcar and modern conveniences such as electricity and indoor plumbing is cheaper and more accessible than ever.

While I agree with you, people compare themselves to their neighbors not their ancestors so in that sense the goal posts have moved. The bar for "middle" class is higher than it used to be.

Homes today are roughly twice the size they were in the 1970s [1]. Despite that, home ownership rates are higher than they were in the '70s [2]. More people today have college educations in the U.S. than any time in U.S. history [3]. I'm not fond of the rhetoric about the poor middle class. There are issues we need to solve w/r/t poor economic mobility. We should be focusing our attention more on solving those problems, and less on complaining about things that aren't true.

[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-squ...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

The economy is a "forward-oriented enterprise." What matters is not so much where we are but where we are going. To that end it's important to understand that homeownership rates are falling fast [1], birth rate is falling [2] and "80s babies" (ie the Millenials) are much, much poorer than their parents were in their 20s and 30s.

If you're an investor (and everybody's an investor whether they like it or not) the question you should be asking is what things will be like in ten years.

That said the article (like pretty much all economics that comes out of The Atlantic) is pretty silly. The dire condition of the American middle class is completely the fault of the US government. In the last 30 years (while China has achieved world historic growth) the US has dumped trillions into wholly unnecessary wars and giveaways to international investors. The $20 trillion dollars the US government has wasted is the greatest malinvestment in the history of the world. All the money that should've been spent on vital innovations and critical investments and infrastructure was used to blow up brown people and inflate asset prices. 2008 was just the beginning; the consequences of this extraordinary malinvestment will take decades to ripple through the global economy. The 9.9% or any other arbitrary percent of Americans are only to blame to the extent that they haven't overthrown their government and executed a few politicians. Over and over electorate have failed to correct the system and so politicians like John McCain -- who helped push America into the greatest crime of the 21st century -- are widely lauded instead of arrested.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/51771766-7c7c-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc...

[2] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/22/17376536/fe...

[3] https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/HFS/essays/HFS...

This is nothing specifically against you or your comment, but it highlights the problem with how we talk about these things. A single 25 year old making $75k in the suburbs of Youngstown, Ohio is in no way comparable to a family of 4 making $75k living in the San Francisco. We really should frame the numbers in relation to the per capita poverty line for that city/region. For example, middle class should be something approximating 2x-5x the per capita poverty line rather than any specific dollar amount.

I like that idea. Have you seen someone do this before? Would be interesting to see some numbers.

Yep, you see it a lot in San Francisco (I've noticed it creeps into my mind a lot more frequently than I'd like to admit).

The thing is, it's like the boiling a frog in water analogy. You get desensitized to it. I tend to work with salespeople, so there's a tendency to get flashier things than a lot of my programming friends, but it manifests in things like always having the latest iPhone (or it's Android equivalent), travelling internationally a couple times a year, going for brunch whenever you feel like it, being able to save a good $10-15k yearly without really trying. Maybe hitting Tahoe a few times in the winter. Going to Soulcycle or Equinox to work out during the week. But you still can't buy a house in San Francisco. So you don't feel rich, but compared to the average American you're taking home a multiple of what they're making. It shocked me to find out the average household income is about $60k annually.

We all live in a bubble. San Francisco is a bubble. Dayton Ohio is a bubble as well. And when you live in a city with a ton of rich people (and a sizeable population probably in the bottom 10%) it gets pretty easy to forget about the other 80% who live somewhere in the middle of it all, in Concord, or Pleasanton or whatever they call it in the East Bay.

It’s relative on how you define wealth really - ability to provide stability in the form of a mortgage, or amount of money you make.

I feel like in SF or any big expensive city owning a home is not something for the middle or upper middle class - there’s a point that no matter how many brunches or vacations you can take, you can’t trade them for a house except in an area where you’ll be basically going down in economic and social class (live out in Tracy or something, have a 2 hour one way commute, far fewer vacations etc). The trade off for that “stability” isn’t one that a lot of people currently renting think is a good deal. IMO the best way to do it is keep on renting while putting as much money in investments and retirement funds as one can, with the idea of retiring somewhere else, or only buying if you get a windfall.

But I’m terms of lifestyle, those in that 9.9% have a far richer one than the rest, but they don’t have the long term security of owning their own home.

Owning a home is overrated, it owns you.

Depends how big the home is.

Relative to your income.

My home was about $120k. It’s easily affordable on a tech industry salary. The median household income in my county is under $30k...

Ahh, so you mean the debt owns you, not the house per se.

Is this just a general comment about mortgages? As it stands, my mortgage is significantly less than most people's as a proportion of my income.

I'm not jacob019, who originally made the comment, but as I understand it, the point was not the debt. The point was the maintenance. When the basement floods, it's my problem, not the landlords. When the attic fan fails (I was surprised that attics had fans), it's my problem. When the driveway concrete starts to buckle, it's my problem.

In that sense, the house owns you, not the other way around.

this.

That’s what I thought you meant at first, hence my size comment.

The problem is, renting often ends up owning you too. I'm no stranger to the anxiety of leaky pipes, dry rot, flooded garages, water damage, crazy people you can't easily more away from. On the other hand, I know people who have had to move a few times now because their rent keeps getting jacked up. Single family houses, as well as apartments in many Bay Area cities, aren't rent controlled, so you never know when you're going to be looking at a huge rent increase.

Choose your poison.

Homes in Pleasanton are expensive... not sure what you are on about..

>Yep, you see it a lot in San Francisco

The median household income across San Francisco and San Mateo counties is $115k. People who make close to that are entirely justified in calling themselves middle class. Spending half your take-home on a crappy $2500 apartment doesn't make you rich just because the apartment is in SF.

"But you still can't buy a house in San Francisco."

Are you in a dual income family, and have you considered buying areas like the Excelsior, Ingleside heights (excluding Ingleside terrace), Oceanview/Merced Heights, Outer Mission, Portola, Silver Terrace, or other such neighborhoods?

I don't mean to dismiss your question, these are still expensive neighborhoods, probably between 800k-1.2mil for something decent. This is tough for two incomes, as the dual income thing means you're also stuck with high childcare costs, which will probably be ~25k per kid in San Francisco (I'm talking about the kind that allows you to go to work from 8am-6pm - and even then you will have to recuse yourself from meetings to be at daycare by 6pm, officially surrendering your membership in the young people are just smarter and can focus on what's important club in Silicon Valley companies[1).

I do think this is in reach of the group you just described, though. 250k+ family income isn't unusual for two tech workers or other professionals in SF (a programmer and dental hygienist pair, for example, should exceed this).

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-entre...

I agree 100%. I meant to sum up the prevailing attitude on housing out here.

They’re not working class, they’re the professional class, but they’re definitely not ‘wealthy’ in the sense that they don’t primarily earn income through invested capital rather than labor.

That said, anyone with a reasonably long career at the upper end of the professional class can make that transition by investing wisely.

If you are still working you are not part of the richest class.

Measuring income per year misses the richest group of all. Those who would look down on anyone working.

Even the rich need to work to retain their wealth.

In fact, the class of people the GP is talking about do not.

"Every morning when I get up, I look at a list of the richest Americans. If I'm not on it, then I go to work." - Michael Orban

I find HN fairly right wing economically & willing to dismiss that a large portion of the country isn't so well off right now, and has been steadily declining since the 90's.

78% currently live paycheck to paycheck, with this number rising year after year [0]. The endless consumerism that this type of unchecked capitalism needs to survive looks to have a pretty bleak future if we keep going down this path.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

>yearly vacation >kids being able to go to college

People must be insane thinking this is some kind of luxury for rich people, not basic human needs.

Yup! Asking someone "How much money makes a person rich?" is like asking someone "How many drinks makes you an alcoholic?". The answer is typically "Someone who drinks more than I do."

Actually, there is a qualitative difference in play. It is reached at millions USD in (relatively) liquid assets or highly concentrated political power.

It is the potential to do almost anything w here only another big player or a whole society can blunt it and not necessarily effectively.

It is the difference between playing the rules and making the rules.

If you can live entirely from investments you're rich.

Exactly this. I make well into six figures, but only recently. I’ve got a bunch of student loan debt to pay off, I don’t own a house. If I got laid off tomorrow, my family would have serious financial problems within a few months of living off of savings.

I’m doing well, but I’m by no means rich. Now give me another ten years and it’s a different story.

I've made six figures going on three years now. I came from nothing. I was an emancipated minor at 15, made every mistake I possibly could from there to 35(now). I'm climbing out from under it quickly in some respects. My teeth are getting fixed, I'm paying off debt, etc. I know for a fact that I'm one bad lift and twist moving a couch or peculiar mental/physical incident from being homeless.

When I fret to my partner, she says "Honey, you're being to hard on yourself, we are doing great!" But when I look at the stakes and the people I know; The only ones insulated have established families. Having established family even has it's own curse in this day and age. Insulated, sure, but kids that are too insulated via trust fund can get stuck in this weird developmental purgatory that even though they have and won't want, it's hard to find meaning or even give a shit to look for it and take on the risk for what it's worth if they weren't groomed. I've seen lack of meaning take lives.

In the next year I might break loose because I have some ownership in something interesting, but I'm acutely aware of how much it costs to transcend being the wretched of the earth. The treadmill we are on as a human race isn't sustainable. Something I think the article points out succinctly is that with greater inequality we all lose. His grandmother bet it all on the dot com boom and went to work at Wendy's. Anything that isn't an ivy league education is indentured servitude.

I'm lucky to have technology and because I have it, I guess all I can see is potentially a technological equalizer in the near future (at least I hope we can find it near), but we are all being fleeced no matter how you shake it. Globally we are in a race condition similar to a drug addict who didn't realize they were that far gone getting fired from their job. Yeah, the apartment and the girlfriend are up next. But, we have plenty of lies to stack up before then to mask like it's the status quo. This problem is going to take a good think to get solved and we'll need to get high and tight to deal with the stress.

We can still pawn grandpa's coin collection to get a fix this weekend. We'll be back on top before anyone notices.

Let me guess, you can't entirely live off your investments? ;)

Not sure I agree though. So someone who makes $1M per year from their work, but has no investments isn't rich?

Isn't this a strawman?

Clearly someone who makes $1M could live of their investments.

They could once they acquire enough assets.

By your definition, everyone who retires and lives off their investments is rich as well.

I would say so. 23% of married retired couples and 43% of single retirees subsist on their social security; 50% or so have pensions, and some rely on their children. It's the wealthiest minority who have sufficient investments to live off of.

> 50% or so have pensions

A pension should be considered equivalent to the assets that would produce the same returns.

Except you can't borrow against it, or liquidate it in case of an emergency/opportunity. And it means nothing to your heirs.

Accountants have ways of accounting for pension/annuity returns. Their accounting tricks should be used in these cases.

So all retired people are rich?

There's a human tendency to want to blame other humans for everything that happens including weather events.

> I'm sure those 9.9% would be very surprised they belong to the top 10%

Someone with over $1 million in assets is going to be surprised they're in the top 10% of the country? I don't buy it.

> 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"

My read of the article was almost the exact opposite, namely that the author was trying to call attention to the fact that the "top 9.9%" is in fact very much to blame, as evidenced by his concluding remarks :

"It’s going to take something from each of us, too, and perhaps especially from those who happen to be the momentary winners of this cycle in the game. We need to peel our eyes away from the mirror of our own success and think about what we can do in our everyday lives for the people who aren’t our neighbors."

> 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.

On the one hand, it's nice that you have a sense of perspective and can appreciate that you live a more comfortable life than most of the world's population.

On the other, there's a fine line between a stiff upper lip and stoic complacency. There will always be a greater evil somewhere in the world. Just because Mogadishu is more dangerous than my neighborhood doesn't mean I'm cool with people getting robbed outside my house.

Put more plainly : you have the right to ignore issues in your local community, but you should not try to shame others into silence simply because they're not starving.

I see what you're saying. The next tier down from the rich are more culpable (and well-off) than they realize. I get that that is the authors point, and I agree that it's a good one and one worth making. What I'm saying, is that saying "the 9.9%" have the majority of the wealth (50-60%) is a little disingenuous, because while wealth goes up exponentially, at that point you start running out of money at the high end.

If I said that 70% of the wealth is in the 9.99% and the remaining .01% only have 20% (or whatever it is), that would seem a little odd right? Or 9.999% have 75% and .001% only have 15%? Making cutoffs like this feels like the author is mishandling the numbers in order to make his point. Because there really is a pretty big difference between $1m (90th percentile) in net-worth and $6m (99th). $1m in net-worth quite comfortable but not "rich" by even a very liberal definition of the term in most cities (remember most of that is going to be locked up in a primary residence).

And in the end, yes, it is important to recognize our wealth and privilege and the civic responsibility that comes with it. I just don't like it when numbers are mis-represented, whether the underlying point is valid or not.

"$1m in net-worth quite comfortable but not "rich" by even a very liberal definition of the term in most cities (remember most of that is going to be locked up in a primary residence)."

Selling the $1M house nets about $800k after capital gains. 5% investment interest on that nets about $40k/year without touching the principal.

It's definitely possible for a family of two to live on this amount fairly comfortably in a quite decent apartment in a quite decent neighborhood away from the coasts. I know because I was, and making debt service payments on top of it.

Get a part time job as a package handler at UPS or FedEx - for the exercise, of course - and you're sitting pretty.

A middle-income lifestyle without having to work meets the cutoff for my definition of rich.

But can't you see it's just part of the plan of the really wealthy to distract attention to themselves? "Don't blame us; blame your neighbor who has a bit more than you do".

Right, it obfuscates class distinctions between those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money. I'm somewhat cynical but I think this is an intended obfuscation.

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.

> those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money

Controlling policy is one thing.

Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? Anyone who has money actually has some sort of capital or an equivalently powerful financial instrument be it stocks, loans to other companies, government bonds, a house, etc.

Just because you own, e.g. stock doesn't mean you control the underlying means of production it represents a share of. Most people who own stock do so as part of a retirement fund. Those institutional investors, banks, managers, politicians, corporate board members, CEO's, etc. Are the ones who actually control capital. It should be emphasized that a lot of how capitalism runs these days is in the hands of huge bureaucracies that comprise people but don't quite act like people. There is a small class of people who operate at that level as individuals: these are the capitalist class.

This is an important distinction, don't you think?

All those people you listed are still cogs in the machine, to varying degrees. The CEOs are beholden to the boards, who are beholden to the institutional investors, who manage my 401k. Certainly, the CEOs have higher leverage over the system on an individual basis. But anyone whose wealth is increasing mainly through return on capital is a member, if not a leader, of the capitalist class.

Sure, they're all beholden to each other but they're the ones who make the decisions about how to allocate the means of production and which labor power to buy.

People who derive their income primarily from investments but don't really decide anything or buy labor power are a rung below those who do. Taxonomize it however you want provided the distinction remains.

Who would you consider more of a capitalist, the apartment block owner who contracts with a property manager or the property manager who decides who to rent it to?

The high-net-worth individual who deposits his capital with an asset manager, or the salaried fund manager who determines which securities to buy with it?

The angel investor who puts $1M of his own money into a fledgling startup, or the entrepreneur who decides how it's spent?

The hedge fund manager who has bought 40% of the company on Wall Street, or the CEO entrusted to make the daily decisions on company operation?

I'm surprised the grandparent post has been downvoted, because when you get close to how capital is actually managed and invested, it's clear that it's a lot less clear than it looks from the outside. Even people who nominally have "control" over capital expenditures are subject to market returns. If they don't invest that capital correctly, they will lose the ability to manage more capital.

> Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital?

1. The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. That money provides a roof and access to quality education, but in almost all cases, it's not being efficiently deployed as capital.

2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority shareholder" vs. "just another investor". That's the difference between "controlling capital" and merely having a bit of skin in the game.

> The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing.

There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment.

If you're trying to make a distinction between income generating assets and assets that don't generate income, you're just digging yourself into a hole - housing doesn't generate income, but it does save cost - namely rental cost. In that sense, it is a better investment because the return is less risky.

> 2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority shareholder" vs. "just another investor". That's the difference between "controlling capital" and merely having a bit of skin in the game.

That's well and good, but it's just as true for most people above the 10% line as for those below. You have to get to some truly lofty heights before you find the activist investors.

> There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment.

I thought of my house as a "use asset", like a car. It's nice when the house appreciates. But I couldn't sell it and "cash out" if I had to use the proceeds to buy another house. But, as you said, it saved on rental costs.

Owning a house is an intergenerational investment -- your kids can sell it and make a tidy unearned profit on what you spent, or live in it and pocket that amount of money in not having to pay for another living arrangement. It contributes to the high IGE of the US the author was talking about.

> You have to get to some truly lofty heights before you find the activist investors.

That was exactly the point the GP was trying to make...

There is a big difference between being in the target market for discretionary investments and small-time political fundraising, and being able to buy influence.

Not surprisingly, every time you zoom into an exponential distribution you will find... an exponential distribution.

Divide and conquer. I think someone finds it convenient to break up the 99% narrative. It's very similar to the excoriation of public employees unions who negotiate solid living wages for their members - it makes too much of a contrast for many who are on basically a subsidence living in the private industry

> I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.

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.

Note that the article and comments are talking about wealth, not income. I know a few young software engineers who are likely in the 98th percentile for income but not even the 90th for wealth.

According to https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta..., the ratio between the 98th and 89th percentile of wealth actually is roughly 5-6x. (89th is around 1.1 million, 98th around 5.8 million).

Thanks for the source.

I noted that the wealth gap would be larger, but it's still not enough to make the parent poster's comment accurate (filling in a few points, you have 93rd percentile ~ $2 million, 96th ~ $3 million, 97th ~ $4 million).

Of course, income doesn't map that directly to wealth, even after accounting for age (if your income derives from a salary/investments from savings, you expect to move up further in wealth than in income as you age). Those 98th percentile income software engineers won't be 98th percentile in wealth when they're 60 unless they save extreme amounts of money, but they'll enter that 9.9% if they're prudent.

I couldn't find any firm numbers on "the 2nd 1%", so I'd probably have to get my hands on some data to calculate it. That makes sense though. 1%, 9% and 90% may be a reasonable approximation of upper, middle, and lower classes.

And I think your point about the interests of the 9% being more aligned with the 1% than the 90% is an important one. Which is part of the author's point as well, that the 9% are really benefiting from the system in a way that those at the bottom aren't.

And I myself am an example of exactly this. I plug myself in those calculators and think "how much would I have to make to be in the 1%?" rather than "this is unfair, how do we lift more people up?"

People are wired to think of a wealth as a zero sum game. If tomorrow everybody's income will increase by 10%, people will pay much less attention at their income getting bigger, but the fact that this increase is smaller in absolute value that someone's else. Which would naturally feel to them as if they were robbed of this extra somehow.

> 1%, 9% and 90% may be a reasonable approximation of upper, middle, and lower classes.

It's reasonable to define 90% of the country as "lower class"? Sorry, no, I can't buy that definition. The top of the bottom 90% are upper middle class at least by any reasonable definition.

I think the point TFA was making is that the 9.9% hasn’t experienced a decline in wealth in order to feed the accretion of wealth in the top 0.1%, and that such a situation creates an aristocratic attitude among that 9.9%, dulling any motivation to fix wealth inequality or economic immobility in the bottom 90%.

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

The difference between comfort and struggle, hmm?

Three real question is what the 9.8% can do even if completely united to fix the problem that the top 0.1% cannot stop. Unless you mean politicians (who are typically in top) - because power and wealth are related but nor equivalent - and transferable plus exchangeable.

The premise of the article is so ridiculous that I wonder if it's a false flag. "The 9.9," by and large, are not the ones who have subverted the basic American principles of democratic governance, free markets, and equal opportunity via regulatory capture. They aren't rich enough. The 1% is.

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/

>Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading.

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.

Do you find topographical maps arbitrary and misleading too? 'Cause it's the same method. What alternative methodology for describing the wealth peak do you prefer? With luck, maybe we'll be able to take it and improve our maps, too.

A standard density function would do fine, and not have a wholly artificial dependence on bucket width.

What's a topological map?

Got it - you won't draw any line; that way nobody in particular is responsible or has to do anything. This sort of maneuver is surely just what the author means when he says a central tactic of the 9.9% is: "the pretense of being part of the middle as one of our strategies for remaining on top."

The OP argument in a nutshell: "In the United States, it’s the children of the bottom decile and, above all, the top decile—the 9.9 percent—who settle down nearest to their starting point."

So how would using just a function, so as not to embarrass any one class, fix that?

I think this is a little different. It's not the whole methodology that's the problem. It's the non-standard bin-sizes. If he wants to do log or exponential sizes, then it's 90.1, 9, .9 or you could round it off to 90, 9, and 1. By making it 90, 9.9 and .1, then he's artificially inflated the middle bin size while simultaneously exclaiming that this bin has more wealth in it than expected.

It's like having a y-axis on a graph that reads: 10 100 5000 10000 (with equally spaced points) and then talking about how there's more action between 100 and 5000 than there is between 5000 and 10000.

9.9 is the top ten percent minus the .1 percent - he agrees the .1% are a problem, but wants to address his own class, the rest of the top 10% = 9.9%. That bin has the size it has, and the measured effects he points to presumably deduct the stats for the .1%. There's no trickery, just a stat or two to conjure with.

If you think he's skewed the measure by using mean instead of median or mode and not subtracting the contributions of the .1% that's an interesting argument but you have to make it - show evidence of that, plus make the calculation to demonstrate that the effect is large. If that's the argument I might suggest dropping "bin size" and employing the term "skew."

There are ways to estimate right bin locations and sizes given a relatively known distribution - maximising information. He's done none of them. (As opposed to disinformation.)

Even simple PCA would figure it out.

You want the hair split more finely - but doing so changes nothing. Not to mention that ya need two possibly correlated variables for a PCA not one, wealth: so unless you doubt that wealth yields social power in the U.S., there doesn't seem to be any work for a PCA to do.

Needing 1.2 million to enter the top 10% gives some indication of the wealth these people have though.

I'm intrigued by thinking about wealth vs income. To get to the 1% in income takes $250k a year, apparently 195k gets you to the top 2%. So in Seattle, that means that almost every software engineer at a big company (amazon, facebook, microsoft, google, etc) with 10 or 15 years of experience is probably in the 1%. Thousands and thousands of people. If I was a dental hygienist like my mom, or a teacher, I'd be middle class but not 1%.

We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are, those of us software engineers. I am hoping against my expectation that somehow there will be good jobs in the future for more than the 1% (bio-medical engineering maybe?).

> We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are

This only applies to a small fraction of engineers clustered in a literal handful of geographic areas. I personally don't know a single engineer in my country that makes $200k (and the cost of living here is just as high as any major US city). Earning half that is seen as a very good salary.

Well, I did say Seattle. Yes, I'm fortunate. I did move here for a good job 20 years ago. I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.

> I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.

Logically it should at least not hurt the rest of the market, but anecdotally : during my time in the midwest, salaries were stagnant / sticky around $80k so I would caution against overestimating the trickle down effect of coastal income.

Although I agree it is a continuum, And I would like to think I am not contributing to the problem, I will point out that we in general are not the ones to choose where the cutoff is and historically, revolutionary retribution strikes deeper than the top 1%.

> holds 40% of US wealth

The government holds most of the wealth.

If you can't afford a superyacht, you are probably not Aristocracy.

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