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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

My comment from when this was posted a few days ago: "In other terms, top 1% owns 32%, leaving 38% for the 9% below that."

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The most interesting bit is that out of that 10 percentage points growth (60% to 70%) for the 10% wealthiest, 9 percentage points are attributed to the top 1% (23% to 32%)!

So, the rest of the top 10% have remained basically at the same level of (relative) wealth (37% to 38%), and the wealth from the poorest has moved to the top 1%!

So, looking at the top 10% here paints a less bleak picture of where the wealth is being accumulated/moved.

IOW, it's not even the rich getting richer, it's just the super rich!

How do you interpret less people owning a greater percentage of overall wealth as a less bleak picture?

Perhaps you misread what I said: looking at the top 10% rather than top 1% implies that more people are getting proportionally wealthier, when it's only the 1% that is getting wealthier. The former implication is "less bleak" than the latter reality.

Because it's not that the top 10% have roughly comparable amounts of wealth: instead it's that the 1.1%-10% have roughly the same amount while the top 1% has concentrated their power even further. I think "less bleak" is a bit tongue in cheek, but at least it could appear to be less concentrated if just just looking at the top 10%.

Any chance the next 10% after that owns exactly 10%? Have we reached a perfect pareto distribution?

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