A Global Guide to What It Means to Be Part of the 1% | Hacker News Reader

A Global Guide to What It Means to Be Part of the 1%

bloomberg.com

14 pointspseudolus5 comments

Compared to the 0.1% or, heaven forbid, the 0.01%, the 1% is downright poor. Why the focus on the 1%?

Also, no focus on wealth inequality in this article, which is arguably much more significant than income inequality.

"Occupy Wallstreet", which was largely composed of naive college students, pushed the phrase "1%". It's catchy.

It's more like the 0.01% that most people actually mean when they talk about 1%, including Occupy Wallstreet. The actual people at the 1% line are kind of boring.

Except you end up getting equally naive journalists pushing equally naive articles analyzing the 1%, and equally naive academics doing the same, and the ultimate effect is that there's very little data and very little analysis on, for example, the 0.01%. And people like Bernie Sanders, for example, seem loathe to talk about them too. I imagine that people don't like to talk about them because of how powerful they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is actually a very useful smokescreen for the <0.01%.

> I imagine that people don't like to talk about them because of how powerful they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is actually a very useful smokescreen for the <0.01%.

No joke. Who's the actual 1%? In my personal experience of friends and family: My doctor, a VP of a big company you've never heard of, another doctor, a higher-up at a corporate law firm, a business consultant, a very senior engineer.

They don't run the world from the shadows. They don't hoard the world's wealth. They pay cash for almost everything, some drive nice cars, and they don't need to worry that their kid won't qualify for financial aid if they get into an ivy league college. Half the ones I know started life either middle class or in poverty.

Yeah, let's focus all our attention on them. I'm sure they have all the answers to fixing the world's inequality.

The 0.01% are a part of the 1%.

Maybe the 1% is equally being fleeced by the 0.01%, but they don't complain. Why should they?

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