Why should 1 out of 5 people belong to a group so wealthy that saying mobility is difficult should be considered problematic?
[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-in...
American mobility isn't bad because people can't make it to the top - you can, more so than almost anywhere in the world.
It's bad because a significant portion of people at the bottom stay stuck at the bottom their whole life. Compared to countries in Europe, this is a lot worse.
Why is it a bad thing that so many people are so wealthy? The more people who belong to the so-wealthy-it's-hard-to-achieve group, the better.
We're talking about the top 20% here. Not the top 0.1%.
But that sort of outcome seems almost impossible in America today due to more factors than I could probably name especially at this hour. But it seems clear to me that America has changed in the last 120-100 years in a way that locks people into their social classes/'earnings quintiles' while perpetuating, I assume to the advantage of the very wealthy, the myth that that old America of extreme social mobility still exists. This is a myth that needs to die if we're to adequately address our problems as a nation. I suspect the solution begins in the education industry.
Catching up in terms of wealth is probably a lot harder (because we continue to get richer).
Replace numeracy with programming and it happens right and left. We came from Eastern Europe with barely enough money to rent for a few months. Now we are in top percentile of earners in US. And have lot's of friends with a similar story.
Then you don't know enough about how well, for example, African and central Asian refugees or immigrants do in a single generation. Same for Hispanic immigrants within a generation or two.
In a generation? I moved here from Europe and within ~6 years accumulated as much wealth as my parents did in a lifetime.
The American dream is still alive and kicking for many if not most immigrants.
But my american friends have a fun joke they like to say: "Wow look at that immigrant work ethic! Wish I could work that hard" ... you could
“Bad” is extremely relative. Some of my good friends were actively getting bombed by USA just 600km south of my city when I was in high school. That’s like living in SF with an active warzone in LA, if they were in different countries ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The plight of a progressive Nigerian immigrant whose family was extremely wealthy prior to immigration is worth more than your story in today's climate.
To be pedantic, exactly 20% are that wealthy.
> The more people who belong to the so-wealthy-it's-hard-to-achieve group, the better.
So-wealthy-it's-hard-to-achieve can only be defined compared to people who can't achieve it. Medieval kings were in that category but lived worse that we do.
They had "running water" -- as in servants would run and fetch the water. There was nothing inconvenient about the king's access to water. It would be served to him. How do you get your water?
Yes, food and drink was probably better for them, because technology related to those can be replaced by manpower. For air conditioning, healthcare, lighting, or travel they had problems.
> How do you get your water?
I takes me a few seconds to get cold, pure water from my fridge.
The bigger benefit of running water I think is hygiene. I doubt they would have a hot shower. A hot bath would be possible for the king, but not other people. A lot of the servants would probably stink, and the toilets were holes in the side of the castle that went into the street. I think it smelled quite bad.
The big problem with your argument here is that it's special pleading. You just focus on some technologies that weren't available then. You don't even make an attempt to show that these very few specific things somehow dominate "lifestyle."
I think having full service everything, and no labor obligations, including architects who can build buildings (and know how to make them be cool in summer!) is very much more important to characterizing lifestyle than any specific technology.
Everyone once in a while, yes, but not for everyday people.[1]
>"lifestyle."
You're right, it does depend on the definition of lifestyle. Some people consider travel to be central to a fancy lifestyle, and that would be hard in the past.
>no labor obligations
Most people on HN likely have no physical labor obligations from employment. We have cushy programming jobs, and many can afford to eat out/order delivery every day and hire a cleaning and laundry service. I can get anywhere nearby in a fast and comfy car, not having to deal with a slow, bumpy, drafty, horse-smelling carriage. I don't even have to walk up stairs, I can take an elevator.
The king has the responsibility of running a kingdom. That sounds pretty stressful to me, much more so that my programming job.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-often-did-people-in-the-Middle-Age...
Modern working class people in the wealthy nations do have better _medical care_ than medieval kings did. That doesn't justify broad statements about "lifestyle."
Medieval kings still ate poor food, you can see it on their teeth, they often had gravel etc in the bread wearing down the teeths etc. The houses, food and clothing, sanitation etc the kings had back then would be illegal to even offer to poor people toady.
When I lived on the minimum my government allows I could still buy higher quality raw ingredients than kings had access to 500 years ago and cook my own meals that are higher quality than was possible back then. It wont be as fancy, no, but it is better in every other regard, and I got access to the different wares year round while they had to account for seasons, spices basically non existent etc.
Aren’t you just literally saying that social mobility is bad?
For argument's sake, let's say that number is a net worth of $500K. (Because that just so happens to be the minimum net worth to be in the top 20% of Americans[0].)
What would you prefer: a world where more or fewer people were able to amass that much wealth? To me, the obvious answer is more.
It does nobody any good for fewer people to be wealthy. Sure, you could look at the numbers and conclude that there's more class mobility, but that's just because more people are poorer, not because more people are making it to $500K.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/net-worth-t...
Society is probably better off when the median absolute wealth increases, which will be achieved by more people achieving higher wealth levels.
But as is becoming increasing clear (again), society is worse off when relative wealth distinctions grow (at least, if they grow too large).
If more people make it to $500k, the 5th quintile threshold will move up. That means that the gap between the bottom quintile and the top quintile will increase. We could choose to be happy that more people have made it to $500k, or we could choose to be upset that the gap between the lower 4 quintiles and the upper one has grown.
Why is it clear?
This sucks for basically everyone, rich or poor. I think we all have a selfish interest in making sure it doesn't come to that.
It seems that you don’t think that society is worse off as relative wealth inequality grows. Society is worse off when people who are mad for whatever reasons start to kill other people. And in any case we should note that it is not actual differences that rustle jimmies, but perceived differences.
Sure, but if that number is such that a significant proportion of society is born with it and pass it along to their children while everyone else can't hope to get there, that's a very different society and social structure than one where a few extremely lucky people happen to achieve it each generation without a self-reinforcing class structure.
> It does nobody any good for fewer people to be wealthy
It could. If we actively redistributed wealth from the top quintile to the bottom quintile, it would do a lot of people a lot of good.
Fewer. That wealth represents the obligation of other people to labor on behalf of the owner or their heirs. A world with lots of rich people is a world where the poor are born into indentured servitude. Equality allows the newborn to enter life debt free.
1. Wealth doesn't require a lot of labor to prop it up, especially not in an increasingly technological world where digital products enable infinite copies at no marginal cost, where code can "labor" in the background without manpower, and where the internet provides infinite distribution to all corners of the globe.
2. Labor today looks significantly different than it did in the past. It's increasingly fulfilling and service-like. In fact, many of the richest people spend exorbitant amounts of time "laboring," e.g. via writing or other creative pursuits.
3. A smaller wealth gap doesn't imply mobility of freedom from debt, any more than a shorter track implies faster sprinters. You can have a more equal society with a narrower distribution of wealth but also greater absolute poverty and misery.
Wealth represents owed labor, because ordinary people have an obligation to pay rent, and otherwise buy resources from the previous generation of humans, who allocated nature before they were born; so they have an obligation to work for owners; and wealth takes the form of ownership of a share of the work done by them.
That's the flawed assumption you're making. Wealth does not just come from labor. It largely comes from technology. Technology provides leverage. It's not uncommon that a single person today can do something that generates 10,000x the entertainment/utility/productivity/wealth any single person could have in the past.
The average person today is far wealthier than the average person hundreds of years ago, and we have fewer indentured servants, not more. That's because we can generate wealth much more easily today, thanks to technology. As a result, we should (and do) have far more wealthy people.
Also, just mathematically speaking, more wealthy people can't mean more servants. To use an extreme example, a society with 99% wealthy people could only have 1% servants, max.
> we can generate wealth much more easily today, thanks to technology
This is a different kind of "wealth." I certainly didn't mean to say anything against higher productivity etc.
I was saying that if someone has more wealth measured in dollars than everyone else in society, that person then has an effective power to prey upon or parasitize those others and their children. So that kind of wealth isn't a positive thing. But technology is different.
> ordinary people have an obligation to pay rent, and otherwise buy resources from the previous generation of humans, who allocated nature before they were born; so they have an obligation to work for owners; and wealth takes the form of ownership of a share of the work done by them.
Yes this is true. We're all part of a vast, interconnected, capitalistic network ("the market") of who people who own/make useful things and then sell/rent/loan them to others in the network.
But here's what's important: (1) Even if you're rich, you have to spend money on things created by others in the market. (2) Anyone has the ability to become a seller of things in the market.
In other words, it's not about owners vs workers. Rather, it's about consumers and creators. The "and" is important, because everyone is a consumer, plus everyone has the ability to simultaneously be a creator. Being a consumer isn't a bad thing, and doesn't make you subject to rich parasites in any way that I can see. Additionally, the internet and technology are only making it easier to become a creator.
Social mobility isn’t really about the “difficulty” of achieving any particular level of wealth. It’s about how many people who start at some lower level of wealth achieve some higher level of wealth. Income inequality is also not really about the “difficulty” of something. It’s not exactly “difficult” to inherit the wealth of the wealthiest person in the world, either, but it obviously can only happen to a very small number of people in the world.
Generally, we try to equalize the brutal laws of nature and offer equality of opportunity and try to remove blind, dumb luck from human life...with health care, with insurance, with social equality...sometimes, we succeed, but this is a failure.
Do you mean to say people who do nothing deserve wealth?
So not nothing.
> I’m sure they’d contribute nothing if they were able
So they're not even _able_ to do nothing.
Money is basically an abstract representation of power, so that's almost a tautology.
> Another reason would be that most rich people don't allocate capital in a way that's good for society
This is an interesting claim? What is good for society, and relative to whom?
I suppose the obvious comparison would be relative to "poor" people, but poor people don't really intentionally allocate capital at all by virtue of barely having enough for their immediate needs. Even the selfish rich people tend to invest their capital, usually into lucrative projects that make money by fulfilling some need of society. I guess i wonder if that's so bad, or at least if its worse than the other social classes would do.
That's not how money is made. You need some kind of parasitic mechanism to enable massive accumulations.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776
Decarbonization, novel drug research, preventative medicine, high speed rural broadband, public transport, nutrient rich foods, exercise, education.
In the USA's case: for every one person who is that wealthy there are dozens of people struggling to put food on the table.
I don't know where you think 12% of Americans "struggle from food insecurity". But I don't trust your numbers because my anecdata says different.
Per Federal Reserve studies, ~10-15% of US households have no discretionary income after all essential expenses, which includes food. For people in this financial state, any unplanned expense will cut into their already limited budget for food. Even though they have food, and won't starve, this risk is likely sufficient to be deemed "food insecure". However, in practice this is often offset by the myriad USDA and other food subsidy programs.
We received a lot of free food from the US government when I was a child, and I doubt the programs are less generous today. I definitely would have met the definition of "food insecure" at the time even though we always had food.
On the other hand, I know people who spend less than $7 per day on their entire food budget. They receive just barely enough money per month to cover rent and food (and a little left over to pay for wifi and a small savings for computer upgrades) but they don't struggle from food insecurity. I live in Canada, though, so I don't know about the welfare situation in the US.
That might be a place to begin investigating the difference between your lived experience and more systematic data collection efforts.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
Where are we going with the money thing?
If the goal is everyone have money to access stuff (get to 0%)… why money?
Just provide stuff?
Socially make the story “this is how acquisition of stuff works and what stuff is available.”
Like we do now. Just minus the money.
Everyone lives under a quota for stuff given how much money they have.
What’s with the arbitrary data structure (dollar) and old man algorithms for dividing it up?
Furthermore, this often is done at the expense of everyone else. Wealth may not be zero-sum, but that is only true in the abstract sense; I wouldn't be surprised if we found out that most people who are at the topmost quintile acquired their wealth by sucking value out of the system (e.g. rent-seekers, parasitic middlemen, etc.), rather than via value generation.
There is no problem that people are wealthy, the problem is that the wealthy people do not share (accountability, wealth, etc.)
* wealthy here is used in a relative sense, not in an absolute one. Obviously it's good that people in general are wealthy absolutely.
Much more than they’re willing to admit this controversy is about envy on that side. They cloak that envy in a veneer of concern for the poor and concern about the undue influence that money allows; both valid concerns. However, they then target policies that exacerbate poverty and make worse the absolute plight of the poor.
The other side is not willing to admit that for them it’s more than a bit about avarice. They hide that avarice in myths of the self made founder and myths about ethically conscious capitalism; both things you can find laudable examples of. However, many hide their privileged starting points and sell out immediately when profit conflicts with their morals.
Why should some people be able to run much faster than I can?
It's not fair there are many men handsomer than myself. They should be required to wear a mask.
Your wealth can absolutely be taken away to help me afford food, shelter, and healthcare.
Furthermore, my handsomeness does not in any way directly gain me the aforementioned things needed to survive and thrive. Your wealth absolutely does.
Forcing Hollywood to hire fewer attractive actors and more unattractive actors will meaningfully transfer lucrative roles to less attractive people.