[samiv]

Yep. I'm not an economist but my social democratic common sense would tell me to look at the bottom 10% income bracket and see how they're doing.

Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent.

In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.

[IshKebab]

Bottom 10% are outliers though. Bottom 50% is much more reasonable.

[bryanlarsen]

Treatment of bottom 10% and treatment of bottom 50% are both interesting metrics, but for very different reasons, and they are often contradictory.

The "bottom 50%" is a measure of how well you make it possible for everybody to succeed without extraordinary help.

The "bottom 10%" is a measure of extraordinary help.

[onraglanroad]

The capitalist response to that would be that the investment in companies is better because it makes everyone richer in the long term by increasing overall wealth.

I'm not sure I buy it but it's an effect to consider.

[kubb]

That does sometimes happen - investment does cause development. The mistake is to assume that's always what happens, and that everybody can benefit from the development.

[onraglanroad]

Oh I agree with you. I suspect it happens less than is the conventional wisdom, but I might be wrong.