Should the 1% Protest the .01%? | Hacker News Reader

Should the 1% Protest the .01%?

priceonomics.com

51 pointsPythonicAlpha17 comments

"The 1%" is catchy, but it falls well within Dunbar's number. Even people on the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum run into people in the top 1% of lifetime earners on a regular basis, many of whom are doing notable good. Once you get into more rarified sectors of the income distribution, they are more or less invisible on a personal basis.

Interesting.

Recently I made a distribution of the wealth of the top 250: http://checkthis.com/2gw4

Even within the 0.01% you see a lot of differences.

Are there enough people in the 1%, concentrated enough to form a critical mass, to protest the .01?

I would imagine it would take a lot more sheer numbers. Plus, they're doing relatively well already no? So how many are pissed enough to risk what they already have?....

Historically most coups and revolutions are led by lower-upper sections of the population in question (colonels & young lawyers being the most stereotypical). They are the ones who have enough social capital to do something effective, haven't been quite co-opted or selected for obedience, and see their ambitions thwarted by the people directly above them.

Can someone explain to me how this data doesn't simply reflect the 80/20 rule to the nth degree and or why it is unexpected??

Not sure why you're downvoted. It's a good question. I think the main reasoning is that if that were true, then we'd see that magnitude of inequality across much longer periods of time (rather than only growing over the last 40-50 years). But that assumption might be false, also.

I know that the inequality is accompanied by all sorts of bad acting that has helped "cause" it, but I think that's beside the point. I wonder more if there's some reasonable policy we could have put in place that would have actually kept things consistent with where they were in the 60's and 70's, or if larger system elements were already in play that would have overwhelmed things even if our various bits of deregulation hadn't happened.

Not sure why the downvotes either. Was an honest question...

top 1% is a fucking joke. A cop and a firefighter in SF are top 0.5%. A teacher in Palo Alto and a software engineer are too.

They are for the most part, normal people that aren't even financially independent. The sick wealth is all concentrated at the very, very top.

> A cop and a firefighter in SF are top 0.5%. A teacher in Palo Alto and a software engineer are too.

No, not even close. If the top 1% makes nearly $400k/year, then the top 0.5% is probably at least double that.

I read somewhere (forgot exactly where) that top 1% threshold in the SF Bay Area is around the $900K mark, not the $370K national figure.

who refers to local top 1%? That completely changes the picture. Most people in the so-called top 1% live in high cost areas. Changing the context invalidates any discussion.

There are cops and firefighters who alone make more than 400k+. An average one in SF of each makes 185k a year. Thus combined they are over the 1% threshold.

[citation needed]

"The top 1 percent of American households had pretax income above $394,000 last year. The top 10 percent had income exceeding $114,000."

That's a misconception.

I earn six figures, and I'm in the 71st percentile, because I'm the sole breadwinner in my family.

It's time to take down the oligarchs. Let's start with the carried interest tax loophole.

It's not the exact percentiles that matter, but one's relation to the means of production. If you work and earn a wage or salary for your living, without which you would become destitute or dependent, you are a proletarian. If you earn your living largely from capital assets, as capital-gains or dividends, and can choose to work or not, you are a capitalist.

The precise matter underlying income inequality is that the income distribution between labor and capital has become tilted strongly towards capital.

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