Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion for the first time | Hacker News Reader

Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion for the first time

usatoday.com

50 pointscmurf25 comments

Given the aging demographic trend over most of the world, both the number of and wealth of millionaires should be increasing.

What most people (and this article) tend to ignore is that a 65 year old should be richer than a 25 year old. 40 years of good savings discipline will lead to a nice number. Maybe not a million, but a large sum regardless.

Instead, this article wants to focus on the ultra-high net worth (although the article uses a $30 million cutoff instead of the usual $40 million). In the end, you have an article that is more likely to divde people than get people to say say, "wow, those older folks sure did a good job savings - I should do that so I can be like them." Instead we get the opposite.

At least in the US, those old folks definitely did not do a good job of saving. The boomer generation did not save money.

The ones I know personally all did...

Much of HN likely lives in a similar bubble.

They did invest in bonds and have massive pensions. Lack of savings hasn't prevented them from growing wealth.

> Instead we get the opposite.

because young people have less money, less opportunity to get money, and the expensive things are far more expensive.

Isn't this due to inflation? A couple of percent decrease in the value of the dollar makes a huge number of new millionaires.

Asset price inflation, yes. Not consumer price inflation, which has been low to nonexistent for a very long time.

So when the bubble bursts, their wealth will come surging right back down.

Inflation has been low, but regardless that just means money is worth less, it doesn't make you a millionaire (unless you owned a Bay Area home!). In any event, the dollar has actually been quite strong.

No. Inflation has been near 0 for most of the western world since 2008. The increase is a result of lax monetary policy ( central banks flooding the world with money ) and asset price ( stocks, housing ) increases.

In other words, inflation hasn't increase 10.6% last year.

If you want to check historical inflation data.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

Wealth concentration of this magnitude seems like an extremely inefficient allocation of capital. Dollars get things done and having them concentrated and controlled in a just a few spots seems like the worst way to apply their value. A person of this level of wealth has no problem using the wealth simply for personal gain.

The concentration of wealth seems to undermine democracy.

Democracy seems to be working out decently well, concentration of wealth seems to run counter to democratic ideals. I guess that's how it has always been in capitalism: undemocractically-selected application of larger amounts of capital.

For instance, if one of these wealthy people decides to spend on a $1BB on PR campaign to run for office and they win; they will have effectively bought the outcome of the election like any other off-the-shelf product.

This level of wealth inequality could be a national security risk.

If the level of wealth concentration gets too high, we could start seeing a new market of privately-owned paramilitary sharing the space with what was originally occupied by branches of the military.

> Democracy seems to be working out decently well

Doesn't seem to be working particularly well in the US.

Meh it has a few bugs, definitely currently on an unstable build, but it's a huge enterprise system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and technical debt but it's still running though after almost 200+ years.

When you make the Coase Theorem account for the marginal utility of money, the whole thing falls apart.

What a worthless statistic. No normalizing for the number of millionaires or for inflation. And a million dollars ain't what it used to be.

It's still ~50 years of the average household income in the USA. Which is to say more than most Americans will make in their entire lives.

More like 17.

59k is an average household income and average households have 2.5 people, which is likely two incomes (over 60% of households).

That becomes closer to something like 33 years, which nudges close to the boundaries of most people's entire working life.

edit: national average wage index for 2016 was 48,642, so I guess for a working individual thats about 20 years then.

The only thing I'm getting out of this is that the average person who saves modestly and invests can accumulate significantly more than a million bucks in a normal working career. None of which is relevant to my original point of the worthlessness of this particular metric.

Right, sorry, still though household

As both global economic growth and inflation continue the fraction of the world's inhabitants with more than the arbitrary $1,000,000 cutoff will continue to grow. Not that net worth is always the best measure of wellbeing, the person with the least net worth in the world is an American with billions in debt despite his several mansions and I don't think he's worse off than I am.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com