To grasp the extent of inequality, look at the relatively well-off
blogs.lse.ac.uk
blogs.lse.ac.uk
Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical.
It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control.
The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.
Back in the feudalism days the ruling classes typically took between a third and a half of what the serfs produced[2] which is what is happening now as rents are taking over 30% of take home pay in many areas of the country.
> This means that 37% of the average single person's salary now goes on rent, though this proportion is even higher in London: a staggering 52%.[3]
Considering there’s all the other taxes like council tax, income tax, vat and whatever else, the average worker is most likely paying the same amount (or possibly more) to the ruling classes that they did in medieval times.
It's not "almost" modern feudal like system. It is. No other way of looking at it.
[2]https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/feudalism.html
[3]https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/single-person-salary-rent-p...
Did the serfs get free housing under feudalism? Otherwise you can't really compare how much the serfs were taxed compared to how much people today spent on rent.
>Considering there’s all the other taxes like council tax, income tax, vat and whatever else,
All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't.
edit:
...that serfs didn't get
That's what the third to a half of what they produced paid for, the right to live and work on the lord's land.
> All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't
No, but what "welfare state" did exist, such as transport infrastructure, was paid for by the lord, rather than directly by the peasant.
You realize that the "rent" you pay includes the cost of the land, as well as the actual building on top. My point is that comparing whatever serfs paid and got in return (ie. only access to the land) and what the typical renter today gets (ie. access to the land and a finished building) isn't comparable.
>> All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't
>No, but what "welfare state" did exist, such as transport infrastructure, was paid for by the lord, rather than directly by the peasant.
whoops my bad, missed a "get" at the end of that. The complete sentence was supposed to be:
>All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't get
I'm pretty sure most serfs were renting pre-existing dwellings.
And I'm not sure what you're getting at with this welfare state stuff. Yes we get taxed and receive things in return but so did the serf. The only difference is the serf typically only paid one tax for everything that also included his rent. Currently, people are paying the same amount as the serf did just for rent (30-50% or more) yet the landlord has no responsibility to maintain roads and any of the other basic services he did back in the day. Instead the worker has to pay for these things on top of what he is already paying the landlord. The only benefit the modern worker is getting over his medieval counterpart is better quality housing.
Who built the pre-existing buildings? I somehow doubt that the feudal lords were pre-building the houses landlord style. Also, after the building is built, there's the cost of maintenance. Today, that's the responsibility of the landlord. I doubt that back in the day the serfs would be contacting the lord if they had a leaky roof.
>And I'm not sure what you're getting at with this welfare state stuff
That was brought up because the original commenter was talking about all the taxes that people have to pay.
>The only benefit the modern worker is getting over his medieval counterpart is better quality housing.
That's exactly the contention. Renters today are getting access to the land and a living unit that costs a non-trivial amount of resources to build. Serfs get access to the land and a mud hut. Sure, maybe if you work out the numbers the "living unit" part of the rent is actually trivial, but as it stands right now the numbers aren't directly comparable.
Yeah some building is going on. But a lot is getting passed down or rented out to other people when people die. If I remember correctly the Crown essentially seized all land with the Magna Carta and then diced it up as they saw fit and anyone in any existing dwelling was forced to pay or booted out.
> Today, that's the responsibility of the landlord
Er no it's not. The developer builds the property. The landlord buys it and rents it.
> Today, that's the responsibility of the landlord. I doubt that back in the day the serfs would be contacting the lord if they had a leaky roof.
Yes, this is true. But many landlords will also refuse to pay out to get certain things fixed. On top of that, you're also not allowed to modify the dwelling you live in if you want to see your deposit again. Which you probably won't because they'll make up some kind of reason not to give it back to you.
If you can't see the similarities to how medieval aristocracy and modern day landlords are bullying the rest of society for their own benefit and extracting the same proportion of money from them, then I can't be arsed to convince you.
Also, you sure do look like a sealion to me.... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
On the other hand, serfs were also bound up in much more obligations than simply providing part of their income to the lord (e.g. it wouldn't be the lord building and maintaining the road that he had to provide). And they couldn't get up and leave, even in principle, if they had a bad lord.
1. serfs paying 30% (or whatever) of their income and getting a parcel of land and a mud hut that "didn't cost much to put up"
2. someone today paying 30% and getting an apartment unit that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and comes with electricity, plumbing and air conditioning
and concluding that the plight of the latter is basically the plight of the former?
Here's another way of looking at it. Imagine that medieval society had the same construction technology we have today. Everyone lives in modern homes, with solar panels providing electricity and their own septic tanks for waste, and their own water collection systems. Other than that, the social structure is the same. Is there much difference between that and what we have today? Or is one set of people in society essentially freeloading of the other?
Yours is the same misunderstanding that leads people to mistakenly think $40k shipping container houses are an answer to the housing crisis. It was always about land - its intrinsic scarcity and who gets to hoard it. Probably 10% of my rent is actually paying for the building.
Mayfair is hoarded by one man and his "right" to its rents stems entirely from violence - his ancestor helping William the Conqueror conquer England. In this sense feudalism was kept around the whole time - like herpes.
Control and ownership of land dictates the flow of parasitically extracted wealth - it's much the same whether I'm paying 2900 per month to a landlord in Maida Vale who doesn't have to work thanks to me (but somehow still can't be bothered to call out a plumber) or if I'm paying 1/3 of my income as a peasant to my lord.
>All of that funds social services
Social services have been severely eroded in the UK while the % spent on rent and taxes has sharply increased. The NHS is a wreck compared to what it used to be in the early 2000s and the social housing list is DECADES long.
These already eroded institutions are a hangover from the decades when unions has real power in the UK and in the next 10 years they will be eroded still further.
That might be the case, but the apples to oranges comparison by the parent poster is hardly convincing evidence.
>Social services are being severely eroded in the UK while the % spent on rent and taxes has sharply increased. The NHS is a wreck compared to what it used to be in the early 2000s and the social housing list is DECADES long.
That can't possibly be due to other factors, like the aftereffects of the covid-19 pandemic, or all the baby boomers retiring and requiring way more medical care? Not to mention that adjusting for inflation, population size and demographic structure, NHS spending is actually up since the early 2000s[1].
[1] https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-past-present-...
More like satsumas to oranges. Land is still the key component of wealth extraction irrespective of whether the rents come with a house or without.
>That can't possibly be due to other factors, like the aftereffects of the covid-19 pandemic, or all the baby boomers
No, because those are not other factors they are scapegoats. Covid didn't ruin the NHS - that had been happening for years - covid just exposed the underlying frailty of the system and was an excuse to jam even MORE corruption into the system.
Baby boomers retiring is not responsible for an increasing share of the country's income being dedicated to rents.
I'm excited to see what kind of new scapegoats our leaders will come up with to rally the simple-minded once covid becomes distant history and the boomers all die off. Hopefully we won't get a re-run of that "it's all the [ insert ethnicity here ]'s fault" thing from the 1930s.
What. What do you mean by "free housing"? The serfs paid a land lord a portion of their labour in exchange for housing on "their" land. How is that different from the arrangement under capitalism today?
For those not in the mood to read a 700 page tome, listen to his lectures (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ofjozfEr-U, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i5x_MrTuYs). I promise it's worth it.
I suspect taking their wages in stock wasn't an option actually offered to janitors, and even if it had been, they wouldn't have taken it: unmarketable equity doesn't put a roof over your head or put food on the table. Bezos, on the other hand, could afford to take below market compensation (at least liquidity-wise) because he had a pile of money already from his time in finance.
A $600k house barely registers in the wealth / inequality spectrum the parent is talking about.
Similarly, as the OC notes, quintiles aren't useful either.
The genius of coining "We are the 99%" was to better draw the distinction.
I'm struggling to think of possible labels and differentiators. To better inform both discourse and policy making.
Maybe something based on log-log scales?
Thoughts?
If you have even a half hearted belief in meritocracy that represents a failure of epic proportions.
As a top 10%-er wouldn't qualify for a mortgage to buy the house I grew up in.
This wasn't an accident. The country has been on the road to serfdom and ever since Thatcher violently crushed the Labour unions.
Part of the difference may be that none of us have lived in HCOL areas.
They would tell me that their retirement plan was a bullet.
I'm glad you're doing well though.
I'm curious, what do you think "half hearted belief in meritocracy" consist of? From the rest of your comment, it sounds like any sort of economic system where you can earn money without the effort of yourself (ie. investment) isn't meritocratic?
Doing well in your career means nothing because the benefits are a rounding error on the rewards of having wealthy parents or getting into bitcoin early or whatever.
Quite apart from being grossly unfair it's grossly inefficient to structure the economy so that unearned income is privileged and dominates.
E.g. an entry level job on Wall Street might have paid $15k/yr and a really nice apartment was $150k…a 10x spread - today that entry level job is say $150K but the same apartment is like $3-5m closer to a 25x spread…
But you're making a bigger number, so it's fine! Don't mind those that own everything unofficially taxing those that own nothing with inflation.
Not really sure where I am going with this except to express surprise at what appears to be a massive wealth discrepancy between the US and what I had long considered its closest comparable economy. I had never really done the research though thus my surprise.
Around the same time this rice visualization went viral: https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw
Comically, I think I could order the scale with four hour delivery and count by weight faster than this person counted one at a time.
This is their thesis:
> The focus of this book is on the larger group between the 1% and the 10%. These are the managers and professionals of our media, business, the third sector, political parties and academia and are just as influential. However, many would not recognise themselves as high earners at all. In fact, earning around £60,000 a year in Britain places you in the top 10% of income earners. Maybe you’re surprised you fall into this category, or are not as far off as you thought. But despite this group’s relative advantage and comfort, these high earners don’t feel politically empowered. They worry about their income and are anxious about the future.
Uh, yes? Aren't these just trite observations? Professionals who earn somewhat higher than average salaries live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars and go on nicer holidays but they are still stuck working for a paycheck like almost everybody else.
I get the impression the authors badly wanted to write a book about about income inequality, a subject they feel strongly about, and then tried (and failed) to come up with something fresh to say.
The meta point here is that academia has become fiercely competitive and that's why you see books like these getting written. CV padding by people desperate for tenure. I sympathize, but also wonder if we need yet another book rehashing arguments about wealth and income inequality.
Why do there have to be new insights? Inequality has been a persistent problem, and it's only been getting worse. The problem needs to be consistently highlighted, not tossed under the rug.
It's like global warming. Researchers have known about it for a long time, and there are no "new insights" except that it continues to exist and is getting worse.
The new insight is that inequality keeps rising and the more we say "nothing new here" the more we boil the frog.
The statistic I’d me more interested in is cumulative earnings adjusted for age + untaxed transfers/benefits (e.g. inheritance or public pension benefits).
>Meanwhile, traditionally upper-middle class professions such as law, medicine and academia are threatened by automation, precarisation and increased competition in globalised labour markets.
Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy.
The New Zurich Newspaper had a very sobering article on how academia is loosing it's last edge, that of gatekeeping higher paid jobs in a globalized economy. A degree used to be an effective showstopper for upwards mobility, because not many could afford one. This might be europe specific, but conditions for undergrads from the middle class were abhorrent up until the mid 80s here in europe.
The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.
> The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status.
Because of the environment created by their parent generation. They're the ones pushing for ever more "professionalization" your honor! Where my parent's could have gone into the field I want to get into without a degree at my age, I have to graduate in order to attain any respect.
I think you completely missed the point that the authors were trying to make, which is that being in the top 10% of earners isn't as "secure" as you might think, you could easily fall out of that position, and almost everyone would benefit from a strong social safety net. This is as true in China as it is in the UK or the US.
>Apart from this being the entire point of globalization
>The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.
This is a rather old fashioned attitude. The United States has been furiously decoupling from China ever since Trump and that process has only accelerated since.
Russia has successfully decoupled from the entire western world. Mexico just became a larger trade partner for the US than China. We aren't globalizing, we are de-globalizing.
The jobs that fled to China will come back. The idea that they'll be returned to a robot is nothing more than investor copium - an uneducated presumption from people who have little to no understanding of what actually goes on in a Shenzhen factory.
In addition, Startups hire you as long as you have experience. We will see more of this in areas that don't require specific certifications.
>Russia has successfully decoupled from the entire western world.
Lol ask the Russian gov on where they plan on procuring chips after the war. Same for China. You need to be US allied to be allowed top notch silicon. In China this drives innovation at least, but Russia still hasn't been able to mass produce competitive silicon. Modern manufacturing processes are driven by automation, give it a decade and their industry will be lagging behind by a margin that's impossible to catch up.
Yeah, of course.
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
-- Keynes might as well have been talking about IT procurement managers.
Just like nobody got fired for hiring IBM, nobody got fired for hiring Accenture, even though they absolutely should because they're probably the worst consultancy on planet earth.
Degrees also provide a degree of arse covering for hiring managers.
Meanwhile, Western countries birth rates are declining.
I dont know what the solution is but this is the argument for the destruction of western civilization.
And maybe that would make a lot of people happy but I would not want to live in a world without things/ideas that Western civilization has created.
They (stupidly) would rather have all of a small, shrinking pie, rather than sticking with a smaller slice of a much, much larger pie. Even if they themselves would have been better off taking the smaller proportion.
I don't know if that's the win you think it is.
Shenzen =/= all of China
Percentile Single Individual Couple with no children Couple with two children under 14
10th £9,800 £14,600 £20,500
50th £19,700 £29,500 £41,300
90th £38,400 £57,400 £80,300
97th £59,700 £89,100 £124,700
Sometimes it is good to realize that those of us who work in tech are privileged.
Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London.
I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio.
All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.
I doubt the big shots will let the housing market crash. The falling property prices are promoted as a negative in the media.
In Germany they're already propping it up to keep it from crashing because big real estate firms demand they can't loose and their political pawns will comply.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/struggling-german-pro...
Last year I believed interest rates would never rise to a level that would cause stock market crash but it happened. It was faster in the US but BoE also reluctantly is raising & market now pricing in 6-6.5% terminal.
Last year, I also believed Liz Truss would get away with 150B of energy subsidies by borrowing away. Because most politicians in the last decade have indeed got away with it. Rishi Sunak as FM spent 400B on furlough, covid loans and eat out to help out (idiotic idea imo). BUT, she didn't.
These events have changed my beliefs. Math is never wrong, just that sometimes market is so complex and economy goes through cycles that it seems illogical but eventually, it will all even out.
Silly article. It's basically claiming that since even the relatively well off are not doing so great nowadays due to inflation, etc. they may appreciate some wealth redistribution (to those even poorer) because they now understand inequality. (The article authors also imply inequality will lead to a revolt, aka. the stick).
Yeah, sure! You can bet the relatively well off which are feeling the economic heat will just love to pay more taxes and plunge even more rapidly on the economic ladder.
It was a really strange transition and kind of torpedoed the entire article.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work. We've seen how that plays out - the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues.
The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is much harder to game and also fairer.
This is missing the point. It's not the "mere existence" of the ultra-wealthy, it's that the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society. For example: "while the top 10 per cent grew its share of total income by 7.6 per cent between 1980 and 2018 (from 28.5 per cent to 36.1 per cent), the top 1 per cent grew theirs by 6.3 per cent (from 6.8 per cent to 13.1 per cent), which leaves only 1.3 per cent of share growth for the rest of the top 10 per cent."
> The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them.
That is the focus on the article. The point was that the top 10% are not necessarily raising their absolute living standards, because most of the income gains are going to the top 1%, inflation is rising, housing prices are rising, student loan debt is rising, existence in the top 10% is often only temporary and precarious (think layoffs and other economic trends), and as the article says, "The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status."
Someone can easily fall out of the top 10%. It's a lot more difficult to fall out of the top 1% and back into the working class. Wealth begets wealth.
What, do only the ultra-wealthy have smartphones? High level the big issue is overpopulation. At the pointy end of the stick we have the crusade against cheap energy.
You can blame the outcomes on the ultra-wealthy looking after themselves, but fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting. Picking the ultra-wealthy as a bogyman isn't going to fix things. The ultra-wealthy don't have huge storehouses of food to feed the hungry. They don't have 10 years supply of cheap gas for everyone. They can't magic cheap goods out of the air without someone else working to build them.
Everybody seems to cite smartphones as raising our standard of living, but as someone who lived a long time before smartphones existed, I'm not seeing it. In fact, I would argue that smartphones have overall made us worse off. We're like slaves to those little devices, unable to put them away, always with our heads down in subservience.
> fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting.
Agreed. I wasn't "blaming" the ultra-wealthy, and neither was the linked article. It's merely an empirical observation that the system isn't benefitting most people. And the article discusses what to do: "High earners have two options. The first is to stockpile every possible advantage for themselves and their children. The second is to contribute to a common safety net that benefits everyone. While the latter looks highly unlikely in the current political climate, high earners won’t be able to isolate themselves from mounting inequality for much longer." Obviously, the authors favor the latter option: "Making our social services – our schools, housing and health – more efficient and equitable will help all of us through predictable and unpredictable phases of our life and in turn prevent inequality from continuing to exert such a huge drag on our productivity and well-being."
A smartphone is not an absolute requirement in life, but what is? Food and water. Other than that, not much. After all, there are homeless people. But we wouldn't say that a home is a "luxury item" or "discretionary purchase".
Pretend Elon Musk disappeared and you got your $8 allocation from his fortune ($180 billion over 8 billion humans), would that really make a difference to your life? Even for people living in complete poverty where $8 might be more money that they see in a year it is still a pitiful amount of real resources. As a one-off payment.
The existence of very wealthy people really isn't the thing holding back median living standards.
What you're missing here is the power and political influence of the ultra-wealthy. They aren't just passive participants in the system. Rather, they actively shape the system to suit themselves. They can buy politicians. Or as you said yourself, "the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues." You mentioned Musk: he bought up Twitter, the influential social network, and has turned it into his own political propaganda machine.
The ultra-wealthy make too many of the decisions about how resources will be allocated in the system, i.e., which goods will be or won't be produced, and they try to rig the system to direct to themselves most of the economic gains of the system, to break and suppress labor unions, and to undermine and destroy the social safety net that the article authors (and myself) support, either to produce a desperate worker base willing to do anything, or just for ideological reasons.
It's not about redistributing their money per se, it's about breaking their concentrated power. Money is power. This is why the ultra-wealthy continue to accumulate money far beyond any amount they can possibly spend on themselves/family/friends for material goods and services.
I would say that 8 billion people each having 8 economic "votes" is vastly more democratic (small "d") than 1 person having 180 billion economic votes. Democracy itself is endangered by concentrated economic power.
The ultra-wealthy don't have a lot of choice in how resources are allocated. As just pointed out, Elon Musk has power of about $8 per human - relatively speaking that is an insane amount of power. Absolutely speaking it is not that much. Consumers and regulators have most of the power there. The ultra wealthy mainly control which people sit where in the social pyramid, but not what the pyramid then does.
If people allocate resources in a way consumers don't like they go broke really quickly. That is one of the reasons free markets are so successful - they punish people quickly and effectively for bad decisions no matter how much economic power they used have.
> Democracy itself is endangered by concentrated economic power.
Democracy is a tool to enable concentrated economic power. The most democratic successful society in the world is the US, ie, one that has consistently voted for lots of capitalism. The people who wanted to decentralise economic power were the communists and it turns out committees and big groups suck at making good economic decisions and lots of people literally starve.
> ...we are largely talking about redistribution from ourselves to ourselves...
On this point the article descends into nonsense. The authors believe this is a thing and will be proven wrong in an experiment.
Regulators can be purchased.
> If people allocate resources in a way consumers don't like they go broke really quickly. That is one of the reasons free markets are so successful - they punish people quickly and effectively for bad decisions no matter how much economic power they used have.
That's not true. In fact, the wealthy are uniquely able to lose money for long periods of time, producing "loss leaders" to drive all competitors out of business and monopolize markets. In recent decades, this money-losing strategy has been weaponized time and again. It's practically a badge of honor for VC-funded startups to brag about how much money they're spending and losing.
It's also crucial to note that consumers are not an undifferentiated mass. They're not all the same. To go back again to your example of Musk, he become the wealthiest person in the world by selling a luxury brand to well-off consumers. Needless to say, Teslas are not cheap. It turns out that the wealthy catering to themselves is quite profitable, even if it doesn't help the non-wealthy much. And to look at another example, Apple became the wealthiest corporation in the world by selling luxury brands, iPhone and Mac.
> The most democratic successful society in the world is the US
I'm not sure I would agree with that characterization.
> The people who wanted to decentralise economic power were the communists and it turns out committees and big groups suck at making good economic decisions and lots of people literally starve.
Communist countries are not decentralized, nor are they democratic. To the contrary, they're extremely centralized. All power is in the hands of a small group of unelected (or sham elected) political party leaders. And you'll have noticed that both Russia and China have migrated from communism to capitalism while retaining their totalitarian governments. It turns out that political and economic systems are separate. There are plenty of other countries in the world as democratic or more so than the US but with significantly more socialism and social safety nets. The US is practically alone among industrialized nations in failing to have national health care, for example.
> On this point the article descends into nonsense. The authors believe this is a thing and will be proven wrong in an experiment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "will be proven wrong in an experiment", but it sounds like, uh, nonsense? It seems like a strange response, because you've already said multiple times that redistributing money from the ultra-wealthy won't get us very far, so doesn't it follow by your own logic that any significant redistribution of wealth in society and social safety net will have to come from the 99% rather than just the 1%?
> ...this money-losing strategy has been weaponized time and again...
Sure, but that strategy is a side effect of policies designed to protect borrowers and drive up house prices - which are often some of the more electorally popular policies. I typically take the side of the argument that thinks that loss making companies should go bankrupt and let me tell you, people do not like the implications of that once they start getting laid out.
> Needless to say, Teslas are not cheap.
We seem to be having some drift in this conversation. Are we talking about the ultra-wealthy or people who can afford Teslas? I can afford a Tesla. I'd agree that people earning less than me has very little real economic power since they aren't breaking in to the middle class where most of the consumer activity happens.
> Communist countries are not decentralized...
You've misread, I never said communist countries were decentralised. They wanted to decentralise economic power away from the wealthy and repurposed it to the benefit of the people - that was one of the core tenants of socialism. Of course it didn't work, but that was one of the goals - pulling power away from people like Musk.
Democracies are decentralised systems that centralise economic power towards people who best use it. Mainly by voting with their feet. Keeping with the Musk example, there is a big contingent of people who think he makes the best car and they centralise a lot of manufacturing power under his leadership. Democracys are very flexible though and move power around quickly when it seems to make sense.
> doesn't it follow by your own logic that any significant redistribution of wealth in society and social safety net will have to come from the 99% rather than just the 1%?
Sure, but that isn't ourselves to ourselves. That is from one group (traditionally the middle class because most of the choices about resource allocation happen there) and to a different distinct group (historically varies).
There are no electorally popular policies. We vote for people, not policies, and elections are usually popularity contests rather than policy choices. Not to mention that the Overton window is extremely limited in many cases, especially under the US political duopoly.
> Are we talking about the ultra-wealthy or people who can afford Teslas?
The latter. The point was that one can become ultra-wealthy while still ignoring the vast majority of consumers.
> the middle class where most of the consumer activity happens
I wouldn't say that Tesla is a middle class phenomenon. If you divide the population into thirds, calling them upper class, middle class, and lower class (I'm not sure whether this corresponds with the "standard" definition of class, if there is a standard, but that doesn't really matter for this purpose), there's a ton of money to be made by selling to the top third of earners while mostly ignoring everyone else.
> They wanted to decentralise economic power away from the wealthy and repurposed it to the benefit of the people - that was one of the core tenants of socialism.
Who is "They" exactly? Of course Marx wanted that, but he was merely an academic, not the leader of a country. It's not clear that the actual leaders of Communist countries wanted to decentralize economic power, nor did they fully practice the core tenants of socialism. After all, the economy of the Soviet Union was literally termed "central planning".
> Keeping with the Musk example, there is a big contingent of people who think he makes the best car and they centralise a lot of manufacturing power under his leadership.
The total number of Teslas ever sold is fewer than 5 million, and many of those vehicles were sold to repeat customers. The contingent is not that big, compared with the overall population. In my view, this appears to be mostly the upper income bracket empowering the ultra-wealthy.
> Sure, but that isn't ourselves to ourselves. That is from one group (traditionally the middle class because most of the choices about resource allocation happen there) and to a different distinct group (historically varies).
This is missing one of the main points of the article, which is that being part of the top 10% of earners for example is not necessarily a permanent state of existence. It can be temporary and precarious. I've personally been all over the economic map during my lifetime. Economic status is not static.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the incestuous relationship those religions have (both currently and historically) with the ultra-wealthy and other forms of aristocracy…
by what metric?
>It has degraded because a huge fraction of productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average people is now dedicated to improving the lives of the extremely wealthy.
1. define "huge fraction"
2. define "productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average". I want to see statistics for it. If you're talking about government spending, US government expenditures as percent of GDP is either flat or slowly creeping up[1] in the past few decades. Medicare spending[2] has been creeping up for years and far exceeds GDP growth.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/248073/distribution-of-m...
If we just marked assets to book instead (which makes some sense because there's no way most whales could actually liquidate their holdings at their current price) the world's inequality would plummet.
Consider: would you rather increase the standard of living of the poorest by 2x if it meant also increasing it for the richest by 100x (increasing inequality) or would you rather decrease the standard of living of the richest by 100x and also the poorest by 2x (decreasing inequality). A lot of discourse around inequality seriously proposes the latter (out of ignorance rather than malice).
If you have a population whose happiness is culturally tied to the stereotypical "single-family house owner with a picket fence and 2.1 kids attending Ivy League schools" lifestyle, then your latter solution (where everyone gets poorer) might actually be preferable.
That wouldn't be in the top 10% in the US.
Inequality is skyrocketing, and the "labour" party has become tory, not even "tory light"...
The top unequal countries according to wealth Gini 2019:
1. Netherlands 2. Russia 3. Sweden 4. United States 5. Brazil 6. Ukraine 7. Thailand 8. Denmark 9. Philippines 10. Saudi Arabia
But what do you do about it? Especially in America the rich are those in power, so they're not going to shift the needle against themselves.
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I know plenty of people earning around a median wage but no one who actually lives on that little. When you get median wage, or two, or three, you still need someone else to pay your bills.
My employees get 2-4x median wages and they do NOT live on that money alone (almost all of them moonlight elsewhere), and they are almost all struggling.
I am far in top 1% and when i saw what is the asking rent now i said to myself - "wow if i had to move now, that'll be a predicament". Ask any landlord if they are getting paid through the bank. Many won't even accept bank payment. They are paid in cash - and that cash hasn't been in the bank since many circulation loops ago. People are not poor. They are buying everything like crazy, economy is running so hot it can blow up any moment. They just don't report the money they make.
Pretty much yeah. Yes, it's having challenges due to de-industrialization and Brexit, but it's still one of the best job markets in Europe.
Alarmist articles make it sound like the UK is Africa or something.
Also, I live in the US not the UK, but I'd question whether most people in the median income range and certainly as you rise materially above that not only have significant non-salary money coming in but it's of a nature that isn't reported.