Wage inequality may be starting to reverse
wsj.com
wsj.com
While a good CEO may be worth a multiple of any line worker, the notion that a CEO will leave for some other pursuit only holds water if the other pursuits hold higher multiples and are readily attained. They would all work for one-quarter the comp if that is all they were offered. As it is, they'll happily work for double also.
Not hard to see your pay increase as much as you want it to, when you're actually in control of setting it and not just accepting what is given.
"Wealth inequality" is what's relevant if you're concerned about the mega-rich like Jobs. If your assets are big enough you can live off of them without any labour - through rents, dividends, sale of assets etc.
It's interesting if income inequality is going down considering that wealth inequality is worsening in the developed world due to the recent massive inflation of housing assets.
The remaining assets are purchased by the rich who can afford them.
Easiest way to present this problem would be to measure in PPP adjusted dollars the time it takes to save to purchase a basic asset (usually living space) subtracting living costs. Make sure to also consider the asset price long term trend while at it.
If you cannot save, the time is infinity, if you cannot buy it in a lifetime, better also count your (ever poorer) kids in.
This is only the most basic estimate, remember that over time any health issue or other catastrophe is likely to happen, and the response to these often depends the savings you have... (You can count a flat buffer or a percentage.)
1) labor organization (unions) are responsible for the meager gains. That’s it. If higher wage earners (like me!) actually engaged with society and organized their trade we’d get the same gains
2) inequality is not earnestly, meaningfully defined as the difference between compensation for types of labor: it’s the difference between the equity in society held by the workers versus the owning class.
this is borderline propaganda
We don’t know if this narrowing in inequality will last.
I'm certainly for economic justice. But how is comparing apples to canned tuna "inequality"?
As another comment already mentioned, wouldn't our time be better spent discussing the extreme delta between the top and everyone else? The delta between service worker and say tech is far less than the delta between that collective average and the top of the financial food chain.
But here we got again. Distracted. And letting the lede tip toe out of the room.
True when we think purely in terms of wealth and income, but I'd say the reverse is true in terms of quality of life.
A SV tech worker earning six figures has food and housing security, likely has insurance and dental, has a 401k, is possibly building wealth with stock options, likely has a long term achievable plan to buy a home if they don't own one already, has an emergency fund. They can afford to live in a safe area and send their kids to a good school. That's a lot of vital needs satisfied, many (maybe even most) of which are not fulfilled for the average minimum wage service worker. A huge number of people are one missed wage payment away from poverty.
Sure, Elon Musk has a private jet and can fly anywhere he wants every day of the week. But his fundamental needs (physiological, safety, security) are basically met just as well as mine.
The concentration of wealth at the very top is deeply concerning and potentially destabilising. But I think it's worth remembering the differences between the secure end of the middle class and the bottom half society.
Now they own very large chunk of American businesses and land/real estate, no need to work for wages.
Their premise is broken. The largest inequality is not between highly skilled workers and everyone else. It is between the wealthy (top 0.1% or 0.01%) and the rest.
A classic case that was borne out this year is the dichotomy between Warren Buffet and the average railway worker. Railways took in massive profits over the pandemic, and precision scheduling literally killed workers to get there. All the while our supply chain breaks down.
The focus on the ultra-rich is an obvious political ploy. In every western country with a more socialistic arrangement than another, the taxes on the middle class are inevitably higher. And the salaries for high-skill positions are also depressed to begin with, due to legal/social arrangements that force more egalitarian pay scales. You can't get what you want by just taking the income/wealth/whatever of the tippy-top.
If you are wealthy you don't need an income that's taxed a high rate for the plebs, when your wealth is generated by capital gains. Surely you knew this.
Also, your hypothetical is a bit weird. The point of investments isn't to liquidate them immediately, but to reap returns. Owners of significant assets tend to borrow against them instead of liquidating them.
Look here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Uni... . The Top 1% is the small bright pink part of the furthest right bar. You can raid them at 50% tax every year if you'd like, but that's not going to make a big difference.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-av...
Bingo. And don't forget that the AVERAGE number of earners in a top-quintile household is 2![0]
[0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/explaining-us-income-inequali...
No, it's about the power asymmetry that breaks the promises of democracy that comes with it.
In other words, the pitch is something like, "The ultra rich are have too much influence. How do we fix it? Why, just vote progressive!" which is exactly what you would expect if the focus on the ultra rich was merely a political ploy.
You knew for a fact that I could point to dozens of people so you guarded it with something you could move the goalposts on and then be "dude that's not mainstream enough".
Cool. Not playing that stupid game. The entire internet is so fed up with all of these stupid right wing negging games. Nobody cares any more.
You're liars frauds and scoundrels. Everyone's on to it
They use 501s as kobashi schemes for tax dodges through donor advised funds. It's a shell game. That's why they take the $1 salary as well.
As far as the other one, if you think, say, Peter Thiel or Jamie Dimon has the exact same access to the political process to influence policy as the guy fishing for bottles in the recycling dumpster out in my alley, I don't know what to say.
Money doesn't "buy" power and influence, power and influence is an ancillary structural artefact of the money. It comes with rights and privileges. We'd call them oligarchs if they lived in any other country.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that "many people with a common characteristic working in ways that mutually benefit the whole group" is necessarily a conspiracy. Sometimes it is, sure, but very rarely. It's much, much more common for members of a group—like, say, the very wealthy—to individually recognize "hey, if I do X, it makes things better for me!"
That's what happens with massive wealth inequality.
It's a start.
The college-educated middle class aren't losing anything here - their wages went up too.
All that's happening is that the wages of low income workers increased more.
This is great if you actually care about the quality of life of low income people. The difference between middle class people like me and the lower class in terms of the meeting of basic needs (food, health, education, housing) is enormous - far bigger than the gulf in quality of life between me and Jeff Bezos. I don't have a crippling yacht addiction I desperately need to deal with.
It's painting the middle classes as the source of the inequality. That's what leads to the zero-sum thinking that lets the upper classes sit back and laugh while we fight.
Was the purpose of this article to paint that picture? Hard to say. But when you read a lot about smug Silicon Valley programmers and their six-figure salaries and how different that is from the poor people who have to root through their garbage (whoops, no, they made that illegal), and rather less about the very unsexy carried interest loophole and other means by which the billionaires of the world grow and maintain their wealth, the intention behind that disparity becomes less important than the impact.
All egalitarian, equality doctrines will end up here, why wouldn't they? What is the limiting principle?
This is why they should be rejected. Pretty funny to see the outrage when the equalizing starts moving down the spectrum. Why shouldn't that blue collar worker want you to be equalized to him, why should he care about your disgust?
But in reality, that's not how this works. Each company is distinct and has its own funding models. And the vast majority of money taken out of all workers paychecks regardless of industry isn't extracted by other workers in unrelated industries, it's removed by the employers to line their own pockets.
Division is what I interpreted as what elicits disgust here, when workers of all stripes would be stronger if they instead were united.
The scraps that are thrown to blue and white collar workers alike pale in comparison to the wealth disparity of those who need to work as a whole versus who they must work for.
The inequality between a Google engineer and a Starbucks barista is tiny compared to the inequality between a Google engineer and Elon Musk.
The article only covers the former and not the latter and therefore acts as the kind of propaganda expected by WSJ. In the author's defense, they admit they're focusing on one narrow benchmark and ignoring capital gains and dividends in this article. The article still has value. But the fact remains that the article has the word inequality in its title and completely fails to cover inequality in its actual sense, the way we understand it in a political context.