I mean over here you can't look up who makes how much, but the rough value of houses and neighbourhoods, which is used to determine property taxes, is public record.
I'm sure there's some rich people / families living in otherwise underwhelming houses, but they're generally a minority.
Which means that a shocking number of millionaires live in poor neighborhoods and have modest lifestyles.
Those aren't the super-wealthy, of course. But most wealthy people can't be identified by where they live.
And given that the people who attained that status on average lived in cheap neighborhoods, the fact that their income wouldn't stretch long in an affluent neighborhood isn't really a concern for them.
That translates to ~$1.7M - 2.7M, or an income of ~68k to 108k which is still not that significant.
According to the statistics that they gave, an estimated 3.5 million Americans were that wealthy. In 1996 the US population was around 270 million so we're talking about the top 1.3% of Americans by net worth.
For more about what this group looked like, read https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/c....
This is particularly true for intergenerational wealth. I grew up in a area with fair number of affluent households. You couldn't realize it until you became familiar the community.
There are more than you think. Pretty much every city has a nice neighborhood where the wealthy residents live. The difference between someone worth $10mm vs someone worth $100mm is not visible from the street.
You can only get their fluid money which is probably quite similar in a time sensitive situation like that.
I think that, if you could somehow collect all the wealth and redistribute it equally, within a few years we would see disparity reappear. Some folks are better at accumulating wealth than others.
It seems to me that you would have to keep reallocating wealth. And many would then ask, what's the motive for generating wealth if it's just going to be taken away from you?
After the end of WW2, the Allies decided to repudiate the ReichsMark (the German dollar) and issue a new Mark. Everyone who held ReichsMarks saw it go to zero. To get the economy going again, everyone was issued 50 of the new Deutsch Marks.
Within a couple weeks, the people who had been wealthy before were rapidly moving ahead, and the ones who had not been were again at the bottom.
I.e. the people who knew how to make money still knew how to make money, and the people who didn't still didn't.
People storing money under their mattress presumably were in trouble, but doing that already puts you at risk of devaluation through inflation. And I'd imagine that most wealthy people are wealthy because they do exactly the opposite and hold assets instead of currency.
The people that told me this story were in Berlin at the time.
I feel like it's probably a bad idea to let individuals acquire so much wealth and power that they rival some nations, yet I haven't been able to frame an ethical way to prevent it if the "0.001%" have acquired their wealth legitimately, that is, by the rules we all must follow.
The same motivation that drives some folks to study e.g. philosophy, even though it's perfectly well known that this will never make you rich: Because they like it.
You don't just e.g. found a company for the sake of money - you also do it because it allows you to do things on your own terms, it gives you prestige, it gives you the satisfaction of being 'successful'. In todays day and age, this is usually equivalent with 'generating wealth', but I'm a firm believer that this does not necessarily have to be the case.
You don't do it for the paycheck, you do it because you like it. Why education, social work, and other human services fields, but not business? That is odd to me.
It’s not actually that fascinating, and has a simple explanation: the people saying this about teachers are not the same people that are commenting here. It’s a non-sequitur.
The notion that educators (or anyone else for that matter) ought to accept bad pay or working conditions because of “passion” is completely objectionable. Teachers should be well-compensated for the important and difficult work they do.
Is it ethical to force people to give up against their will money that they (presumably) earned "fair and square"?
Assuming we find that ethical formula (which seems dubious to me but let it ride for the sake of discussion) the next question is, would the people willing to work under that system be "enough"? And then we have to ask "enough for what purpose?"
That gets into ethical and speculative issues that cut right to the heart of the human condition. Wendell Berry asked, "What are people for?" Bucky Fuller calculated that we could bring about a secular utopia for ~$25 billion by sometime in the 1970's if we applied our technology efficiently to supplying our physical needs. I'm open to the idea that we don't need open-ended profit motive to create a good and worthwhile global society (in fact even Adam Smith thought the capitalist "greed is good" phase would be just that: a temporary phase between the old system and the new.)
For one thing, people won't have money to invest in new ventures.
The Authoritarian Left that goes on and on about eliminating wealth disparity has no interest in lifting everyone up to be wealthy, not they want to seize the wealth and drag anyone down they deem is "too wealthy"
Which is ironically always someone more wealthy than the person advocating for wealth redistribution, for example Bernie Sanders used to talk about "millionaires and billionaires" until he became a millionaire, now like magic only billionaires are a problem for him
seriously - maybe narcissism isn't the best character trait to structure your society around?