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Comment by sunsunsunsun | Hacker News Reader

I feel this big time. I'm in the top 10% of income earners in Canada and yet me and my family are stuck in a small one bed apartment. We can't buy property as everything in the area would leave us very house poor, if we even qualify for the mortgage.

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Me too. My parents made significantly more in their entire lifetime from the appreciation of a house they bought in the 1980s than they ever did earning a lower middle class wage. It's quite common, but not talked about in polite conversation.

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.

>If you have even a half hearted belief in meritocracy that represents a failure of epic proportions.

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?

Pretty much. If that type of income dominates your economic system it murders the incentive to actually create value.

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.

I am in the top 10% and live quite comfortably in a house I own, provide for two children, and have some disposable income. I would say I live a similar quality of life that my art professor father did, who was making ~$35/yr over most of his career, which was a comfortable but lower middle class income at the time.

Part of the difference may be that none of us have lived in HCOL areas.

The most desperate people ive met in the UK are those that grew up in a HCOL area to lower middle class/poor parents, went to university and did average jobs and paid 60% of their take home on renting a bedroom.

They would tell me that their retirement plan was a bullet.

I'm glad you're doing well though.

I'm in the same boat and was so confused until I did the math what my lower middle class parents made adjusted for inflation and they had more real purchasing power than me.

"Inflation’s silver lining: higher salaries" [1]

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.

1. https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1413132513350803460

Yeah I think the the number that clicked for me was the ratio of home price to entry level wage 50 years ago.

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…

How much does one make to be top 10% of income earners in Canada?

You're probably not in the top 10% when you account for the wealthy hiding their assets from the tax man.

No one who is wealthy would ever refer to their annual income as a defining metric.

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