Quite an interesting fact. I'm sure some people see this as a bad thing.
Also consider that A) things are more expensive here and B) our economy is debt based and many people with homes and cars in the US have negative income after expenses, just because aesthetically our poverty looks different, it doesn't mean that it's good. It's not comparable.
I’ve had people who make less than me tell me I live like a poor person. That’s ok. I know I’m doing fine and they have since told me about some of their money struggles, and have a lot of debt to deal with each month.
Maybe if people stopped using debt to pretend they had more than they do, we’d see more reasonable housing and car prices, as well as goods that are made with some quality and repairablity instead of things like fast fashion that simplely gets thrown away.
Companies doing business in the US go to where the demand is. People need to stop using debt to demand junk that makes things worse.
Step one could be ratching down the average home size. It has more than doubled since the 1950s, while the number of people in the house has gone down. A bigger home is naturally going to be more expensive to buy/build, but then it also takes more land, has higher property taxes, costs more to heat/cool, costs more to repair and maintain, has more rooms to furnish, and has more place to put stuff before a person needs to stop and question if this need all of it. Simply living in a more modest home or apartment can have a massive effect on a person’s finances.
Also consider: where do the billionaires in the US get the resources to fuel their empires? Do they get their cobalt from slave labor mines in the Congo? Do you think maybe there is some kind of connection between corporate greed in America and people on the other side of the world making $1/day or less?
This is absolutely besides the point. I also wish as many people as possible could make enough money to live comfortable lives but it has nothing to do with the problem of people passively earning millions of dollars without contributing anything positive to society.
Fighting corporate greed in the US is in effect fighting for the rights of laborers internationally that are negatively affected by American business interests. No one who fights for this kind of change does so for selfish reasons, it's for all of us.
"Better" is entirely relative and using a western-centric framework to assert a "hierarchy of goodness". However, it is not an objective frame, and there are plenty of detractors both endogenous and exogenous.
What is really of interest here is one, the consolidation of wealth into a pinhead of the population, and two the egregious and worsening condition of wealth distribution in the US. Which I would argue exacerbates the global condition through manifold conductors, in essence it's imperialism-via-market but in equal measure an unabashed use of threats in other capacities to keep other countries in line.
Most people, given the time (which they necessarily trade away) would, I expect, prefer a definitively ethical, sustainable, robust product - however this comes at a cost (which is what they purchase with their increasingly devalued time) and so what we end up with is a consumer-driven market where people don't have enough time to peer down the rabbit hole of ethics and sustainability, instead opting to take the wheel for what best appears to suit their demands. This is then papered over simply by hand waving that introducing the Western market regime is improving conditions globally, which I'll again point out that this is relative. And I think this then suffers further amplification because, it seems for a great many decades, that the US itself has been suffering a slow decline. This itself has many impacts, for instance it has been increasingly salient that something like home ownership is becoming less prominent and so the social fabric must be altered. These dynamics may take a lifetime to shift to meet equilibrium, so you'll have to forgive the many hundreds of millions of people for their disinterest in global affairs when the social contract their forebears penned them is burning to ash.
It sounds like you believe that if the ownership share of the top 10% went up, then the average wealth of the bottom 90% went down. The latter does not follow from the former. Both can have seen increases in wealth.
It's a simple question: Has the wealth of the lowest 90% gone up or down?
(And 90% is too coarse. Would be good to see it for every decile.)
> but that is nearly meaningless when the cost of living has increased much greater than any of those wealth increases.
Can we show that for each decile?
Here's the equivalent of your statement: If I throw a penny into a fountain at the mall, has the wealth of the fountain gone up or down?
Here's more realistic and relevant discussions on the relative gross of the lower classes:
* https://www.cbpp.org/research/a-guide-to-statistics-on-histo...
* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a...
* https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/income-inequa...
This trend will continue until resources are no longer exploitable, or people trying to enrich themselves created artificial scarcity or restrict their trade.
This is false. The concentration of wealth directly correlates with increases of death, starvation, suffering, etc. Inequality is by far the most important measure. "Growth" of income is effectively meaningless on its own without relative comparisons to the other classes in your own country and the significantly higher increases in the cost of living. If you look for the narrative you'd like, you can certainly find a number in isolation supporting it. But that narrative falls down when you look at the whole picture.
Meanwhile, if you want the Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, and Musks of this world to stop being so rich, there is actually a simple, straightforward way to achieve this: STOP GIVING THEM MONEY. Don't order crap of Amazon. Don't look at ads on social media. Don't buy that luxury electric car. It's not them taking all the money, it's us giving it to them.
Perhaps it would be worth calling attention to, and organizing some sort of procedure to elicit an opinion in a democratic manner.
If Google has its way, you won’t have a choice. How do you convince companies not to advertise on X or YouTube?
OK red scare calm down. I think you overestimate how much control capitalism gives you. Criticizing the economy does not make you a commie. If you wanna lay down and accept oligarchy because you are afraid of communism be my guest, but I would highly suggest you fight for slightly better circumstances for yourself and your neighbors.
> STOP GIVING THEM MONEY If oligarchy was limited to Bezos, Zuck, and Musk that would be easy! But billionaires kind of own everything? Our food supply is controlled by a handful of megacorps, our communication network is administered by a few others, real estate is a game for giant investment groups, health care is a fucking joke... It's impossible to elect to not participate in the economy, or at least its impractical for everyone to live off the grid.
Listen I know you think that communism means the goberment controls everything (it doesnt), but at least I can vote for my gov reps. I don't get a fucking vote when Blue Cross Blue Shield is deciding where I can go to the hospital.
One doesn't have to be communist to think that there needs to be some control levers on wealth inequality. Even if communism were required, communism does not necessarily lead to reeducation camps and starvation. Layered and purposefully obscured ownership structures make it nearly impossible to 'stop giving money' to the ultra wealthy. Even if everyone stopped giving money to the ultra wealthy, they're not going to stop being ultra wealthy unless they're especially stupid with their current holdings. Further, how does one stop giving money to those who partially or fully own monopolies on necessities?
If you're freely giving your money to Jeff, then it's not Jeff's fault you're upset about it.
For example, just look at the contribution limits for IRAs and Roth IRAs. They are disgustingly low, limiting people with salaries just barely big enough to afford a mortgage with an hour commute. Now, why is that? It's because it keeps the middle class in place while the upper class has several loopholes they exploit to put generational levels of money into these accounts. The story goes on and on.
What would be an example here?
However, the super wealthy are able to amass tens, hundreds, and even thousands of millions of dollars in Roth IRAs, and furthermore, they use these accounts as investment vehicles into investments not available to non-super wealthy people. The only way that's possible, in accounts with strict and low limits, is through various loopholes in the system available to them because of their wealth.
https://www.investopedia.com/ultrawealthy-exploit-roth-ira-5...
https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
Those are limits on tax advantaged accounts. You can put any amount of money you want into whatever market and have the growth taxed at capital gains rates. If you're talking about backdoor Roths you can (and should) take advantage of it, it's not a rich-person only thing.
1. Put in $6000/yr into your Roth. 2. Invest in low-cost, high-risk high-reward stocks. 3. Get lucky. 4. Boom your Roth is worth millions.
For more seed money look at the list of the accounts you're still allowed to roll-over into Roth IRAs, pump money into there, and roll them over.
The only "rich person" thing is some people have access to non-publicly traded stocks but I have those and I'm certainly not rich.
We can read articles like this, but there are also interesting facts like how a huge percentage of poor Americans have a problem with obesity, something only kings and aristocracy could suffer from just a handful of generations ago. Or die from overdoses (they have free resources to spend on recreational drugs).
Our poor people have transcended the traditional problems of poor people, they are no longer dying from starvation but now obesity. They don’t die of overwork but from recreational abuse of dangerous substances. I don’t disagree with anything in the article but it is worth looking at from a historical perspective.
I think my point is that yes things are unequal, but it’s also worth remembering how much the floor has been raised as well. I would prefer to try continuing to raise the floor rather than lowering the ceiling.