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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

> To start with - the top 1% is a relatively accessible level of "rich." That's an L5/L6 software engineer at Google, or a mid career doctor. Are offshore tax shelters actually available and economically feasible to these people?

I wonder if "1%" is just a number that is repeated when talking about this subject. Another article debated on HN:

https://rantt.com/the-paradise-papers-how-ridiculously-easy-...

also refers to "the 1%".

There's a detailed article on the 1%:

https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states

EDIT: It seems to me that 1% is beyond accessibility. I think that 10% is a (very generic, rough) threshold that can be reached with effort, but not 1%.

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Keep in mind the level of churn. An implicit bias easy to make is forgetting that these are percentiles, not people, and most people move through different percentiles at different times in their life.

11% of Americans will be in the 1% for at least 1 year in their life, 39% will be in the top 10% at some point, 61% in the top 20%[1][2].

94% of those in the top 1% fall out in a year, 99% within a decade[1].

In other words: being a 1%er is a very transient title for the vast majority of even the rich who make it there.

[1]: https://www.cato.org/blog/high-turnover-among-americas-rich [2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/05/308380342/most...

>11% of Americans will be in the 1% for at least 1 year in their life

11% of Americans will make over $500k a year, or have $12M in assets, for one year?

This cannot possibly be true. Oh, Cato Institute? Say no more.

Is 11% earning $500k for at least one year really that surprising? For example, a mom and pop small business selling their store in order to retire could qualify for one year, but that money would likely be the bulk of their retirement savings. It's probably not a useful metric though, if most of those people break $500k due to one-off lump sum payments.

The npr source said 5% of Americans will be in the 1% for 2 consecutive years, so the Cato numbers aren’t far from what you might expect.

What matters more, I believe, is wealth rather than income. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but The Meritocracy Trap outlines the case that wealth can be less transitory.

They use 1% because number 1 is an integer and it can represent a whole person.

This is useful for scapegoating and hatred.

  "The 99% vs. the 1% is the modern articulation of this classic scapegoating mechanism. It is all minus one versus the one. And it has to just be the one. 99.99 people or percent is too granular. Scapegoating 0.1 doesn’t really work. You need a whole person to play the victim. Similarly, 98-2 doesn’t quite have the same ring to it either.  "

Source: https://blakemasters.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels-cs183....

The "1%" slogan arose in the Occupy movement, from statistics such "1% of the people own 50% of global wealth", which such an inexcusable level of inequality.

Ah but no, they are the victims, poor them.

Also, people tend to use 1% of the United States, not 1% of the world.

It's easy to be angry if you're only looking up the totem pole.

There are a lot of people making 360k+ with effort. You most likely need to be talented and have very good work ethic (rare combination) and then focus on right industry. Big trading firms, programming if you're very good or not that good but not risk averse and willing to take shots to start businesses.

Of course not everyone can get there, it's 1% after all but you don't need to be born into it or one in a million genius.

>I wonder if "1%" is just a number that is repeated when talking about this subject.

I'm inclined to think it is. Often times I'll see 1% discussed in articles and the threshold is different each time. At this point, I'm certain that 1% is just a rhetorical device used to mean "bad people with money".

I'm pretty sure you are projecting. The "1%" became a slogan around the time of the Occupy movement, coming frkm the fact that 1% of the world's population owns 50% of its wealth, which is such a hilariously skewed proportion.

> The "1%" became a slogan around the time of the Occupy movement

This is correct. Since then it's become more of a slogan like "power to the people" than a useful statistic.

In some countries, 1% would include a couple who are both mid level engineers -- that's well off, but not "ultra rich" by any rational standard. The main reason is that the 1% figure often refers to households, rather than single individuals.

It's more a short hand for "ultra rich", rather than an actual measurement of what portion is actually "ultra rich".

Did you read what I said? The top 1% of income is ~750,000$ individual, hardly mid-level engineers... As for top 1% net worth, it's ~11 mil$, again hardly "upper-middle class".

You are mixing global and US comparisons.

In the USA, sure, where I'm from it's $300,000 gross household. The United States isn't the representative of the entire world. That's why I specified in some countries.

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