I doubt we'll be so lucky this time around. Things are about to get absolutely brutal for the 90%.
• 50th percentile is 21900,
• 90th is "only" 50600,
• 95th is 70400, that's the salary required for the 220K average UK house.
• 96th is 78800
• 97th is 91300
• 98th is 11000
• 99th is 159000, that's the salary required for the 500K average London house.
It really only takes off from 97th percents. Wealth diagram is probably going to look like that too.
I noticed that I used an older version, so the number have increased a little. The trend is the same though, with
50th: 23200
90th: 53100
95th: 75000
and taking off after that.
We do have a very strong Federal government, but it's designed to funnel money to various interest groups.
By making compute infrastructure affordable and by making consumer review data available for all products, Bezos is a champion of the little guy. He hasn't gotten rich through government crony capitalism or fraud, he's done the simplest stuff better than anyone else could. He let's people buy products that are reviewed thoroughly by other customers, he has a reasonable return policy, etc. This benefits consumers AND honest merchants selling through the platform.
AWS has made it way cheaper to start and scale many kinds of tech startups, and paved the way for firms like Heroku and DigitalOcean, and the entire vps ecosystem.
Bezos is a master of infrastructure execution. This is extremely rare, as we can see from the fate of Jet and Azure. Year after year the genius of his business tradeoff decisions and strategies become more clear. This is why he's wealthy. What we need are more people with that kind of vision and ability to see the big picture and solve real, unsexy problems.
Before AWS I had dealt with Dell as a part of several startups. The sales people were shady and they tried to milk every penny out of the customer for semi-proprietary hardware that was expensive to support. People flocked to AWS to escape the kind of predation and mediocrity championed by Dell.
Most readers of HN have the technical ability to have started AWS but (if they were of age at the time) did not see the opportunity and the path to execution. Bezos did. Let's give him some credit. I think he's one of the most remarkable visionaries of our age.
50% of Americans can't come.up with 500 bucks in case of emergency.
So, unless you're implying that everyone who has "a checking account" has more than 7.3 trillion dollars, sorry, it's just not the same.
I'm not denying that there is extreme inequality between poor in America and poor in Africa or India.
But let's not make false comparisons between having a banking account and being in the top 30 wealthiest individuals. Having a banking account is not the same as having 7 trillion dollars in wealth.
[1] https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fi... (year 2013, page 21)
He didn't do this, his workers did. How many of his workers are making minimum wage, with no health insurance or health insurance they can't afford deductibles for? How many of his warehouses don't have air conditioning? How many people working for Amazon are forced to pee in bottles, pushed beyond their limits?
He's not sitting there shipping all packages, not sitting there soldering amazon echo's, his workers are.
$150 billion shouldn't exist for Bezos and Bezos alone, as the wealth should be spread around the company to the workers who actually do the work. We likely wouldn't be this situation of extreme inequality if this was the case. It's disgusting selfishness that is allowed by our current system.
selfishness is allowed? Is it possible to disallow a core human trait?
Likewise, disallowing envy (or selfishness) by itself is not possible, but making illegal the actions that result from those feelings can (and sometimes should) be outlawed.
All that said. Amazon needs to take a long hard look at how they manage their warehouses and fulfillment centers when it comes to workers rights and common decency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Historiography_and_ev...
Most paint it as a failure of capitalism, the rest as a direct result of government manipulation of the banking system, trade disruption caused by Smoot-Hawley, and huge tax increases.
Depending on who you ask, the New Deal was either ineffective because it was fundamentally flawed, or ineffective because it wasn't big enough and didn't raise enough debt. [2]
Basically, "economic science" as usual...
Absolute numbers are important, but the rate of change more so. Were unemployment raising to 25% or already going down? It's the difference between those 19% being a meager improvement and staving off absolute disaster.
It seems unlikely that some huge portion (say, > 90%) of those historians further believe that New Deal policies had no or little positive effect on the Great Depression. Are the "credible historians" just the ones who happen to agree with you on this topic?
So yes, I believe that most of those 51% and 74% believe the effect was nonexistant or small. Typically, something like "if FDR had spent as much on the New Deal as he did during the War, it would have ended the Depression". [1] (I.e., it was too little, as in my previous comment.)
I welcome any references to historians claiming the New Deal largely fixed the Great Depression. (Or really, any option from a historian more positive than the quoted article.)
Or...you know, just silently downvote this comment :)
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/the-great-depression-of-1929-3306...
We actually have a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn't during the Great Depression and mainstream economic historians[1] seem to have reached a rough consensus.
In school, though, we teach the Great Depression through the lens of political history. So for that purpose it doesn't matter what was really causing it, just what people at the time thought was causing it.
[1] I'm excluding Marxists, Austrians, MMTers, etc here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Mainstream_ex...
EDIT: A while ago Krugman had a very good piece trying to explain how deflation can cause problems. Different sorts of economists often disagree about whether its interest rates or aggregate quantities or expectation traps or whatever that's the most important aspect of tight or loose money but they all agree that these things are real and meaningful and generally explain depressions. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
Not advocating, and I doubt I'd be one of them holding a pitchfork, but it is something to keep in mind.
I find it difficult to imagine an uprising against the 1% in America any time soon, but if it did happen I can absolutely imagine the police siding against the 1%.
I think the chance of the police or military siding against the 1% is incredibly small.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/22485.m...
Successful uprisings by the masses against the elites almost always involve substantial fractions of the military, police, and other security services defecting, either abandoning their gear or taking it with them and turning it against the elites.
Until we get robots replacing guys with guns, that's going to be a recurring failure mode for narrow elite rule.
Assuming the revolting army was full of tech geeks, the best we could hope for is a drone/robotic army that uses technology. Because jocks most of us are not. LOL.
Although I doubt it'd reach the point of massive insurrection. That would require a total loss of trust in the government, and I think we're still far from that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/29/ameri...
So I readily read one in three households, as strictly more than one in three persons - have access to guns?
That's a bad reading. Even if everyone in a household with a gun owner have access to guns, that would mean 33% of households implies exactly 33% of people if gun ownership is distributed among households with no bias by household size. It doesn't imply more than 33% of people unless gun owning households are larger than non-gun-owning households.
There are many non-gun owners that are without a doubt for owning guns.
What part of calling them a vocal minority seems inaccurate?
33% on a binary trait (one either does or does not own at least one gun) is clearly a minority.
Merely owning guns is different than possessing the physical ability and training in weapons and tactics to use them effectively, especially versus military or paramilitary forces (National Guard and Border Patrol is a much more likely initial pro-government force than police). Not only are they equipped and trained with the same weapons civilians may have, they also have automatic weapons, nightvision, grenades, armored vehicles, helicopters, tear gas, sonic weapons, fire trucks, and a lot more.
The fact is that the select few protect themselves with rolls of the sons and daughters of the masses. Sure, plenty of them will turn their weapons on their fellow countrymen for a paycheck, but how many? And for how long?
And especially once those bullets start flying, how useful is the money being paid to those guards? How long before they have all the money they could ever want and no one will sell them food?
In our hyper-connected world, we lose people jobs when they crack a racist joke on twitter. How hard will it be to find the 1%'s executioners?
For example, I don’t know what food you’re talking about because in my wild fantasy scenario, all of the freeways have been destroyed and Walmarts and grocery stores are empty. Mass starvation, plague, panic, electricity is off, no communication systems work other than the military. They have seized anything useful. They have tanks etc, which helps a lot. As far as ‘who will sell them food’... you’re talking about a highly armed military force fighting a civil war? Do you think people are going shopping at Kroger with the other side or something? This isn’t the French Revolution. This is 80 years after millions of people died in gas chambers in Europe, right? The next major wars are not going to be very friendly.
Sure, Shock and Awe was successful, but it was nothing more than a raid. The US Army did not conquer Iraq, at least on the medium term. They barely control most of the territory.
Its not a scenario that I really want to think about since its so brutal. But it can happen, and the war is likely to be a prolonged battle.
Not to mention, the unrest in the Motherland will let other rogue forces run amok internationally as they jostle for supremacy over each other. I can't see any of that ending well.
If the govt or millitary hold so much tech that you end up in a hunger game scenario, and the population is oppressed (but unlike hunger games, the oppression comes in the form of feeble food and entertainment - ala, bread and circus).
The people feel comfortable enough to not want to revolt. Yet, ignores the minority that do get harsher treatment, because doing so puts their own lively hood in jeopardy.
I think though that far beyond contemplating who is shooting at who with what, the more interesting question is what does victory look like for the 1%? Just shoot everyone who complains until there's nothing but peaceful staff left?
If you're talking an actual war of attrition between the classes in the US, you'd be crazy to bet on the rich. It's not even a question of "if" they can win, their win condition DOES NOT EXIST and cannot exist. The more disgruntled people who are killed, the more people become disgruntled, until you have the entirety of the damn country saying "wait a minute, why am I shooting my fellow citizens because Mr. Bezos wants a 10th house?"
If this gets to a place of violence, and if the Rich of today allow it to get to that place, they have assured their own destruction, it's simply a matter of time. The best thing they could be doing right now is supporting measures to help out the common people, if for no other reason than their money cannot stop the torches.
Edit: I'm rambling a bit here but I guess my counterpoint basically boils down to: let's assume that the Rich get full control of the US Military and it's assets to end civil insurrection and restore economic order. How do they do it? What orders do they give? Where do they send the missiles to dismantle the resistance? Which neighborhoods get power cut? Who gets banned from twitter? And how does it end?
I'm just not seeing a way that such a conflict would end where Amazon (or anyone else) could simply resume business as usual.
Any conflict where the U.S. disintegrates will likely spread worldwide, too, as other nations take advantage of the power vacuum to press their own claims. So emigration is unlikely to be a solution for people who wish to remain neutral.
The endgame for the 1% is likely to become lords or petty kings of little feudal domains. They may offer to provide security services to their employees in exchange for economic service. They wouldn't be global titans of industry, but they'd be heads of their little fiefdoms. The smart ones will avoid major military action, instead only clearing the local area around their corporate offices of populist insurgents. If the insurgents want to fight other insurgent groups, that's their business; they can all kill each other off.
Endgame for the 1% is being in a position to gain the spoils of war and to take less damage than your competition.
Private security forces and tech/AI are wildcards - we haven't had anything like the former since feudal mercenary days, and we haven't had anything like the latter ever - but could also form the basis for power centers.
That US military is also neither attacking its own citizens it has filial and friendly ties with, nor attacking people who look and talk like it.
Modern armor and missiles don't accomplish much when the enemies main goal is to just live as they want to (instead of conquer territory or resources).
No sane country would lend us money to wage war on our own people/economic infrastructure.
And mass insurrection would disrupt the supply chain. Nothing is warehoused these days, so the country would fall apart.
Maybe I'm a pessimist. Maybe I should start digging my shelter.
On a more serious note, a population is only peacefully policed at the enjoyment of the people. The critical mass of insurrection beyond which a population can no longer be policed is low. In my lifetime I have seen riots in LA, Baltimore, and Ferguson, to name just three. And those were of minority populations. If the entitled "obese" hegemonic population were part of the insurrection, it might be more difficult to put them down.
Disease, war, some other ecological disaster... a divided and very unequal nation cannot respond to these stresses. This is what ultimately balances things, it's a shame that so many many lives will have to be destroyed in the future because we are too timid to fix the problem now.
Basically troll the party in red states, some might actually get elected on a platform similar to Bernie but tweaked to appeal to right wingers, and then we can work from left/right to pull the masses to a center that's more progressive less corporatist.
Food was actually destroyed during the New Deal to create artificial scarcity in agricultural produce:
https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.html
This destruction of agricultural stock was based on the idea that the problem in the economy was low nominal prices, when that was merely the symptom of the contraction in the money supply as a result of widespread defaults and an erosion in lending.
The low nominal prices were a natural reaction to the reduced money supply, that enabled consumption levels to remain at their pre-crash levels. With their efforts to increase nominal prices by creating artificial scarcity, all the New Deal officials did was reduce economic output, and with it, consumption levels, resulting in lower quality of life.
> New Deal
The New Deal is the arguably the worst economic policy in US history. It turned the Great Recession into the Great Depression [1] [2] and has been an economic anchor on the US ever since [3] [4] [5]
That it has popularly been given credit for the WWII-era economy is doctoring history. That it still further has become the epitome of good economic policy is unbelievable.
[1] http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-D...
[2] https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2018/06/05/tru...
[4] https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
[5] https://www.forbes.com/2009/02/11/new-deal-stimulus-opinions...