Report finds wealth of top 1% up $21T, bottom 50% down $900B since 1989 | Hacker News Reader

Report finds wealth of top 1% up $21T, bottom 50% down $900B since 1989

peoplespolicyproject.org

Don't fall for it:

> This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth.

The "top 1%" and "bottom half" are categories, not entities. They are made up of different people in 1989 and 2019, not the same people getting richer and poorer respectively. The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less. This is not what the statistic means.

So... what is the lesson you want us to take away? It's true that individuals have varying amounts of success and move in and out of any given bracket all the time, but why is that important to what is clearly a demographic point?

On average, if you were poor in the 80's you're poorer now. Some of your poor cohort aren't as poor, and some have lifted themselves out of poverty entirely. Yet more of them are doing worse than they were.

That's bad, right? It's a problem you'd like to see fixed, yes? And it certainly is what the statistic means.

Not only that. It'd be better to be poor in the 1980s, because since then it has become more difficult to move out of poverty.

> The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less.

That's exactly what it means, though. If you hold an investment for a long time, the returns compound. So your wealth grows exponentially.

Conversely, for the poor (debtors, really), compound interest works against you. For example, a college graduate could have an income-based repayment plan and see their student loan balance grow, because of the compounding interest. One of my friends on social media posted about this horror in their financial life this recently.

Do some wealthy people lose everything? Sure, lottery ticket winners often do. Do some poor people ascend to the 1%? Yes, many immigrants of modest means come to the USA and found successful companies within the United States (proportionally, when compared to citizens born here).

But the takeaway of increasing income inequality is very real. A small silver lining: The U.S. middle class is shrinking, but that's because a good number are moving into the upper middle class, depending on where you draw the lines between "middle class" and "upper middle class". Using inflation-adjusted dollars, more households bring in $100k than just two decades ago.

Don't fall for what? The fact that some people move between percentiles during their life doesn't change the fact that the distribution has grown more unequal. What the number means is that, while those who are poor are poorer now in relative terms than 1989, the rich have gotten richer in relative terms.

I think the message is more about general inequality rather than individual progress. Over the past 30 years the histogram of wealth distribution has skewed even more heavily to whomever happens to be at the top at the moment.

We've gone from approximately a 12:1 ratio for 1%:50% to about a 150:-1 ratio. -1!

I'm sorry, that argument fails under the weight of it's own logic, or rather, lack thereof.

How is this even a counterargument?

You concede the point and then post a hypothetical that's not relevant.

And that hypothetical (meritocratic social mobility) is even dubious.

Most work for wages. Workers work a few hours a day creating wealth and keeping the wealth they create. The last few hours a day, they keep absolutely none of the wealth they keep - it is expropriated by heirs. It is a social relationship - we work, they live off our labor. They are parasites, and they have little helpers who they give crumbs to and argue their case, including those who tell guileless fools that a magic man who lives in the clouds named Jesus will make sure they never die.

Man, you had me until you went religious. I think -

1) those people have appropriated Christianity since at least King James, as Jesus and his ministry promoted socialism aka selling all of your belonging to fund social programs; 2) we need to stop distracting from the primary topic of wealth inequality / late stage capitalism. Slipping in jabs against capitalism just gives "those" people a leg to stand on and the ability to redirect the conversation.

If anything, we should force them to confront the hypocrisy of their political/economic policies when compared to their religion.

And how did the top 49% do? A.k.a all of the middle class and above.

I'm confused by this. It doesn't quite mesh with the more recent numbers I'm familiar with such as [1], which shows modest gains for the bottom 50% wealth households from 2013 to 2016 [1]. My guess is that the dotcom bust recession and great recession both knocked down bottom-half wealth holders far more than the interim percentage gains to arrive at the net decrease quoted here.

[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth-brackets-one-per...

It's hard to actually understands the current state of our economy and I doubt I do to any significant degree, but from what I gathered from your linked article, they're purely looking at net-worth.

This ignores inflation and rising housing costs etc.

I guess I'm not understanding the difference between net-worth and wealth in economic terms here then. I assumed they were roughly equivalent.

  >People's Policy Project
  >The primary mission of 3P is to publish ideas and analysis that assist in the development of an economic system that serves the many, not the few.

Some article titles:

  >Tackling Inequality Through the Social Ownership of Capital
  >Capitalism is hostile to families. The welfare state can fix that.
  >The Difficulty of Using the Firm in Socialist Policy

With this as context, it's pretty easy to see that the thread's post is clearly anti-capitalist, socialist propaganda, with a heavy political agenda to make people mad at "the rich" and support overthrowing "the system."

Would you like to engage with the ideas in the piece?

It's essentially "rich people are richer than me, and that makes me mad." There is no novel idea here to engage with. People have been jealous of wealth since the beginning of time. But now we cloak that jealously with faux moral outrage and elaborate economic "solutions."

Can't it be "poor people are getting poorer because rich people are taking wealth away from them on balance, and that makes us mad". I mean... that's bad right? It should make us mad. We're a wealthier society on average than we were in the 80's, we all should be wealthier, yet we aren't.

I genuinely don't understand the denialism on this. You don't have to be a raving socialist to recognize that an outcome is unfair. Can't you be a free market republican and want to see the poor do better along with the rest of us?

Workers are poorer. That's the issue. Wage slave is not just a fancy association of world, it is now the state of a lot of people.

Agreed - for the first time in history 50% of the world is middle class [1]. I’m much more optimistic than the article’s POV.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27...

Maybe so. But the poor of today (at least in the US, which the article is about:

- Have smart phones (entertainment)

- Have climate controlled housing

- Have better food than the poor of 1989

- Have fewer diseases and live longer than their 1989 counterparts

- etc.

It's not fun being poor, but there's never been a better time.

In a similar way, the rich don't live that much better than the next lowest classes. A middle class home feels more like a McMansion than the rich/poor housing comparison of 1989.

So, like, everyone gets the same return in the market - say 5% S&P500 avg return - and so the total return on more money is more than the return on less money, because math.

1.05x100<1.05x1000

And, of course, we all know those with capital get better returns on everything and access to all opportunities. Hence the rich get richer. But that's life and math. So?

Those numbers don't match the ones in the article. Or the real world. If the bottom half of society was getting the "same return in the market" (for any definition of market) it wouldn't be poorer than it was in 1980.

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