| >"National wealth" is not a vague notion, it's the product of lots of government workers doing a lot of statistics Wow what a convincing justification for the need to equate the measurement of rising capital within national jurisdictions over an analysis that acknowledges the distinction between revenue among fortune 500 shareholders and the average person who is not exposed to such returns. >Income for the bottom 10% is rising. Wealth for the bottom 10% is rising. If income for the bottom majority increases at a rate slower than the income of the top minority then "income" is being concentrated upward. Money determines the distribution of resources, it is not a resource itself. If the concentration of the ability to determine resources is increasingly concentrated upwards then people are getting poorer, regardless if overall production has increased. Your idea that everyone is actually getting richer and upwardly mobile is not reflected in reality. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2015AER.pdf https://wid.world/news-article/whats-new-about-wealth-inequa... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10888-010-9155-y >I don't doubt that quality-of-life has declined for a lot of people - but those people are a minority and the data does not support anything else. Most of their pain is almost certainly housing prices, which have been the Great Sin of the Democratic party and notably have very little to do with federal policy. How do skyrocketing housing prices not factor into your judgment that people's quality of life isn't declining?? I don't care who you want to blame it on (!?), not being able to afford a house makes people's lives worse and more people can't afford houses... https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/asse... https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/11/housing-affordabilit... >Most of these takes are bad because that's not how the stock market works. Elon Musk cannot go out tomorrow and buy $3XXB of stuff. He probably cannot even come CLOSE to realizing the full paper value of his net worth in cash. None of the world's rich can. Yet there is a daily, breathless headline about wealth inequality that waves those dollar figures around like they're real. Who's saying that Elon Musk is walking around with a trillion bank notes in his pockets like Scrooge McDuck? You're arguing with shadows, and if you think that wealth is not being upwardly concentrated in the top 1% - which is justified by any metric regardless of the stock market or unrealized assets - then I don't see what I'm going to get out of a discussion with someone so utterly removed from reality. https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in... https://web.archive.org/web/20161225142704/https://www.white... (page 60) >Stop disregarding on actual, economic data in favor of hyperbolic headlines about wealth inequality. It's always a pain talking to someone who is delusional enough to think that the hodge-podge of synthetic economic markers or data visualizations cobbled together by "visualcapitalist.com" is even close to being remotely objective or scientific. |
Can you try to make an actual argument against specific government numbers? This is hand-waving but you're making an absolutely gigantic claim.
> If income for the bottom majority increases at a rate slower than the income of the top minority then "income" is being concentrated upward.
The set of people in the bottom 10% is not constant and most of them will LEAVE that bottom 10% over their lives. I suppose people becoming wealthy is concentration, but this is a good thing. It means the system is delivering.
> Your idea that everyone is actually getting richer and upwardly mobile is not reflected in reality.
You have three links there. The first, from Piketty, has nothing to do with upward mobility and in fact gels very nicely with the data I linked. The second and third are again breathlessly considering net worth in illiquid assets as if it was cash.
Not a single one of these talks about social mobility or how individual's income changes. I'm not telling you wealth inequality isn't going up, just that its impact is greatly overstated and individual income is overwhelmingly the biggest driver of quality-of-life.
> How do skyrocketing housing prices not factor into your judgment that people's quality of life isn't declining?? I don't care who you want to blame it on (!?), not being able to afford a house makes people's lives worse and more people can't afford houses...
Because generally a hair under 70% of housing units in the US are occupied by their owner (more Fed data), so only a hair over 30% of people are subject to housing cost inflation. Not all of those people live in desirable cities where rents are insanely high.
Even among those who do, rents in those VHCOL cities have not inflated (Fed data again) and less than half of renters are considered burdened.
No matter how you slice it, only around 15% of households could possibly care about rent inflation. The inconvenient truth is that the majority of Americans are structurally protected from it.
> Who's saying that Elon Musk is walking around with a trillion bank notes in his pockets like Scrooge McDuck? You're arguing with shadows, and if you think that wealth is not being upwardly concentrated in the top 1% - which is justified by any metric regardless of the stock market or unrealized assets - then I don't see what I'm going to get out of a discussion with someone so utterly removed from reality.
He's not worth a trillion dollars, and IDGAF about him carrying physical currency. The point I'm making is that you are being ridiculous by complaining about government statistics from actual economists while breathlessly accepting every "wealth inequality" headline as gospel.
Yes, Elon Musk is absurdly wealthy. That's what happens when you have huge stakes in the leading aerospace and car company in the US. But once we talk about large amounts of stock, wealth is ONLY VAGUELY the same as cash in the bank.
> It's always a pain talking to someone who is delusional enough to think that the hodge-podge of synthetic economic markers or data visualizations cobbled together by "visualcapitalist.com" is even close to being remotely objective or scientific.
Attack the actual data. That "visualcapitalist.com" animation also uses Fed data.
If you are going to claim that the government numbers are trash, you need to do a lot better than calling me names.
How about you actually respond to my points (government data is not "vague numbers", the bottom 10% is a statistical artifact and individuals move in and out of it frequently) instead of ranting about how the government is untrustworthy?