[ctw]

I'm reading a book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century right now, which is all about this stuff. I'm only about halfway through right now, but here are some points from the book I find interesting (all of them iirc since I don't have access to the book right now):

* the author chooses not to use the terms lower, middle, and upper class because doing so just leads to arguments about where to draw the lines. Interesting that so many comments on this thread are just people arguing about what "upper class" means because it's a personal term. He instead splits the distributions of income into three parts, the bottom 50%, the 40% above that, and the top 10% and simply refers to them by centile and decile. The "top decile" has an unambiguous meaning, whereas "upper class" could mean anything. * there are three distributions: income from labour, income from capital, and combined total income. The people at the top of one distribution aren't necessarily the ones at the top of the other. The book analyzes inequality across different countries across the past two hundred years or so, super interesting stuff * only when you get into the top 0.1% are you earning more income from capital than income from labour * inequality of income from labour is far lower than inequality of income from capital and always has been in every society in every period * inequality from income from labour is _easier_ to morally justify than inequality from capital, but still not necessarily just in any absolute sense * the bottom 50% owns only about 5% of the total capital