Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> Editor's note: This story and chart were corrected to reflect that it is 93% of U.S. households' stock market wealth (not 93% of the stock market) that is held by the wealthiest 10% of those households.

This is actually kind of an important distinction. If you add back in things like pension funds that distributes things a lot more generously.

Also, I am not sure if 1 in 10 people I know even own stock directly. 1/10th of the population is still a lot of people and it almost surely skews more by age than any other metric.

View on HN

Pensions don’t increase their payouts when the market is booming and you can’t include them in a will. So is it’s really not stock ownership as you just get the downsides without the upside.

It depends? With defined contribution plans the payout absolutely depends on the market returns.

Even with defined benefit plans there's an indirect connection -- with higher expected returns, employers will offer larger pensions.

> with higher expected returns, employers will offer larger pensions.

As you say, the carrot is held by the employer.

Is the goal financial security in retirement, or perfectly uniform stock market ownership distribution? Annuities suffer from similar problems but like, if the retiree has sufficient income, at the end of the day, who cares if they personally own part of the stock market?

People see these power law distributions and are surprised? But like, do you actually want enforced uniform wealth (communism)?

I think the issue is more that power laws distributions have a lot of negative externalities. Inequality is correlated with a lot of societal problems.

> People see these power law distributions and are surprised? But like, do you actually want enforced uniform wealth (communism)?

This is a really all-or-nothing take. A handful of people are arguing for enforced uniform wealth, most people are just pointing out that our current economic system is marginalizing a growing number of people each year, while enriching a handful of giga-wealthy individuals.

Communism is more like “off the books” wealth in a lot of ways. In capitalism the people who control sections of the economy “own” them in the same way one owns a shoe. In communism people still control sections of the economy, it just isn’t shown on paper. They do extract personal benefit from that control, it’s just in the form of a weird and inefficient black market barter system.

Your money is still invested in the market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com