[Rinzler89]

What's the actual real world evidence on that? Plenty of rich European families have been rich for hundreds of years, and I'm not talking about royalty. That kind of disproves the theory.

The ones who go broke fast are usually the ones who also got rich fast, trough luck instead of work or knowledge, like from lottery wins or speculations.

[s1artibartfast]

There is a lot of real world socioeconomic data on it. studies usually look at the population in terms of 20 or 25% segments. That doesn't mean it is true for the 1% or 0.1%. That said, there are lots of examples of people entering and leaving the top 1% too, so outcome isn't perfectly deterministic.

[whimsicalism]

Actually, real world socioeconomic data on familial wealth holdings is incredibly hard to come by.

[s1artibartfast]

Wealth is hard to come by, but income is much more available.

Some countries have publicly available data on individual income filings. The US provides anonymized data, but scienentist have done a lot of fancy tricks to make the family connections clear.

Raj Chetty among others have done a lot of work on US social mobility[1]. They were able to trend parent/child incomes in the US going back to 1940, and have tons of great insights.

I dont remember all of the findings off the top of my head, but one was that relative social mobility (%s) for the US have been constant over time. Another was that economic mobility out of the bottom classes is dominated by poor immigrants. It is unclear if it is genetic, personality, or culture, but children of poor immigrants out perform native born poor by an enormous factor (2-3X better IIRC)

https://www.econtalk.org/raj-chetty-on-economic-mobility/

[Rinzler89]

>Wealth is hard to come by, but income is much more available.

Income is a completely different thing than wealth and those two are not always directly correlated. You can have a good income but not accumulate much wealth because all is bein eaten away by taxes and a high CoL, and you can also have a low income but still decent wealth from an inheritance for example.

And the original claim was that wealth gets lost between generations by the majority of people which I find dubious.

[s1artibartfast]

I think that as a practical matter, they are extremely correlated. Wealth sitting in cash loses half its value every 20 years. Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes.

In practice, if you aren't making income, you losing wealth.

[Rinzler89]

>Wealth sitting in cash loses half its value every 20 years.

By wealth, people tend to mean assets, not petty cash sitting in checking accounts. If you're sitting on inherited assets you're accumulating more wealth by just sitting on your ass without doing anything.

Just see the post-2009 monetary polices: from housing to stocks, everything went up like crazy, especially during COvid. You didn't have to be financially literate, all you had to do was sit on your inherited assets and not touch them and the government's money printer did the work for you in the last 10+ years.

So forgive me but I still see no proof that 72% people loose their wealth between generations, when everything went up up up in the last decades, especially housing. Unless that wealth we're talking about was an old carpet and $600 bucks in a checking account.

>Physical assets require upkeep and property taxes.

N'ah bruh. Stocks or empty land in desirable areas requires no upkeep and wealth taxes in some EU countries range from laughable to zero, while income taxes in those same countries hover around 50%. Go ahead, tell me more how income is the same thing with wealth.

[TheCoelacanth]

Wealth sitting in cash is almost an oxymoron. It's not wealth if it's not producing more wealth.

[afpx]

A good book to read is Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" in which he does a lot of analysis to support your intuition.

[afpx]

That page you link says that the poor that escape poverty do so by mingling with well-off people. The poor that stay poor only mingle with other poor people. The best route to becoming rich is to look and act like the rich and hang out where they hang out.

[froh]

the top 1% is people we all know.

the interesting groups are the top .1% and .01%. there isn't that much fluctuation at that layer.

[s1artibartfast]

You said we don't know but claim to know. Which is it?

[froh]

what I meant was the top 1% is one in a hundred, and you personally know some people that are at that income and wealth percentile, don't you?

however for the 1 in 10_000 you may or may not know people in that tier and for the 1 in 100_000 let alone 1 in 1_000_000 you are close to that tier or part of it to personally know them (in such a way that they know you).

[Rinzler89]

It's complicated. Not all wealth is public. Only the wealth of the individuals who's wealth is tied to publicly traded companies: Musk, Bezos, Zuck, etc.

But we also have all those royal families from Europe and the Middle East, dictators like Putin, etc. whos' wealth are secret and very well hidden through crown estates, trusts, shell companies, all through Caribbean off-shores and often under different names. The best you have for those people is guestimations and some leaks from the Panam Papers to get an idea.

[Jerrrry]

Comparing American generational accumulation to the olden European social quasi-caste system is a little disingenuous.

[Rinzler89]

Where did you see me compare it to Americans?

I'm from Europe so my knowledge revolves around local examples.