https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2021-03-1... ("Median household owns $15k in equities")
(unless you're wealthy, you are a token participant in the capital markets)
Congrats on the luck (no snark, honestly). But let us not extrapolate luck and personal anecdotes to solutions for systems. "In God We Trust, all others must bring data", working backwards from first principles, etc.
Unless maybe "the game" is meaning a broader economic "game", which is (apparently) rigged because some people are (way) richer than others? You'd expect something like 80/20 just from a Pareto distribution, which if I understood the paper correctly, generally occurs whenever people have free choice. I guess one could required "not rigged" to provide equal outcomes, but since people have unequal ability, equal outcomes seems "rigged" to me, just in the other direction, of pulling down the highly skilled.
The fact that many would rather spend than save does not change that these opportunities are for everyone. The best selling car in America is the F-150 which is quite expensive...
What does it mean to you to live in world with other people in general? Are we all fundamentally competitors like this? Winners and losers in a game of skill (and definitely not of chance)? Does the existence of losers reinforce the necessity or merit of the game, of the structure in question? Or are we trying to make everyone winners, trying to teach them to get it together enough to not buy all their flashy cars and such?
To be fair, F-150 and other pickup truck sales figures are buoyed by fleet purchases. The better figure to cite may be that the average new car transaction is now north of $48k; ten years ago, it was around $30k, and this rise has beaten general inflation.
This article says about 20% of vehicles sales are to fleets. It says vans are the most popular fleet vehicles. It syas "light trucks" (which includes vans) outpace cars in fleet registrations at 22.5% vs 17.3%. https://www.autoserviceworld.com/fleet-registrations-continu...
Based on that data, I see strong evidence that the F150 is not boosted over other types of vehicles. I certainly found nothing to support the idea that it is, and if it is, it does not seem to be a strongly dominant consideration.
Are you sure it's not luck?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol... ("The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized")
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-... | Ref: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 ("Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure")
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-i... ("Analysis: If you’re rich, you’re more lucky than smart. And there’s math to prove it")
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-you-realize-how-much-... ("When you realize how much luck goes into investing, you might change your methods")
A couple living on social security + 2 million in assets may be financially secure but they are still middle class.
We can certainly extrapolate if we look at the last 13-14 years.
This is tautologous. "Wealthy" means mostly "built, and still owns a decent chunk of, a company whose shares are highly valued".
Also, I could, like my parents, own nothing in the stock market, but have a paid off house and decent savings and a state pension, and be doing well. Proportion of capital markets ownership is too skewed a metric to reason about.
No, it's not, and it's a problem that you're thinking this way. A tautology would be "Americans in the top 10% of wealth are wealthier than the bottom 90%." A tautology is necessarily true according to logic.
Logic does not dictate that the top 10% own 90% of the equities. And, in fact, there's a strong argument that societies with extreme inequality in wealth distribution are structurally unsound societies (I don't mean that they're economically unsound, though I'd argue that, too).
> there's a strong argument that societies with extreme inequality in wealth distribution are structurally unsound societies (I don't mean that they're economically unsound, though I'd argue that, too).
This just depends on how you define "structurally unsound" and "economically unsound".
The exact percentage is exactly critical informarion.
Imagine, for the sake of argument, that the 10% own 100% of all net worth. Imagine net worth of 90% of the population is exactly at zero. Do you think democracy would still function, liberty would survive?
The folks at zero would be closer to slaves than to anything we recognise today.
That's still not a tautology just because in practice it is usually true, and is easily disproven as such: Stock values could all nosedive to nothing, and the wealthiest people would still mostly all be the wealthiest due to non-stock assets.
Not that easy. If the wealthy own 90% of the stocks and 90% of their wealth is in stocks, and the stocks disappeared, they may still be wealthy due to the remainder, but still the bulk of the their wealth was in stocks.