[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.

[s1artibartfast]

It seems like you didn't read the whole post. If anyone ever sells those assets, they are counted as income.

The vast majority of wealth isn't empty houses, ever rented, and never sold.

[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.