Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical.
It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control.
The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.
Back in the feudalism days the ruling classes typically took between a third and a half of what the serfs produced[2] which is what is happening now as rents are taking over 30% of take home pay in many areas of the country.
> This means that 37% of the average single person's salary now goes on rent, though this proportion is even higher in London: a staggering 52%.[3]
Considering there’s all the other taxes like council tax, income tax, vat and whatever else, the average worker is most likely paying the same amount (or possibly more) to the ruling classes that they did in medieval times.
It's not "almost" modern feudal like system. It is. No other way of looking at it.
[2]https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/feudalism.html
[3]https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/single-person-salary-rent-p...
Did the serfs get free housing under feudalism? Otherwise you can't really compare how much the serfs were taxed compared to how much people today spent on rent.
>Considering there’s all the other taxes like council tax, income tax, vat and whatever else,
All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't.
edit:
...that serfs didn't get
For those not in the mood to read a 700 page tome, listen to his lectures (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ofjozfEr-U, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i5x_MrTuYs). I promise it's worth it.
A $600k house barely registers in the wealth / inequality spectrum the parent is talking about.
Similarly, as the OC notes, quintiles aren't useful either.
The genius of coining "We are the 99%" was to better draw the distinction.
I'm struggling to think of possible labels and differentiators. To better inform both discourse and policy making.
Maybe something based on log-log scales?
Thoughts?
If you have even a half hearted belief in meritocracy that represents a failure of epic proportions.
As a top 10%-er wouldn't qualify for a mortgage to buy the house I grew up in.
This wasn't an accident. The country has been on the road to serfdom and ever since Thatcher violently crushed the Labour unions.
Part of the difference may be that none of us have lived in HCOL areas.
I'm curious, what do you think "half hearted belief in meritocracy" consist of? From the rest of your comment, it sounds like any sort of economic system where you can earn money without the effort of yourself (ie. investment) isn't meritocratic?
E.g. an entry level job on Wall Street might have paid $15k/yr and a really nice apartment was $150k…a 10x spread - today that entry level job is say $150K but the same apartment is like $3-5m closer to a 25x spread…
But you're making a bigger number, so it's fine! Don't mind those that own everything unofficially taxing those that own nothing with inflation.
>Meanwhile, traditionally upper-middle class professions such as law, medicine and academia are threatened by automation, precarisation and increased competition in globalised labour markets.
Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy.
The New Zurich Newspaper had a very sobering article on how academia is loosing it's last edge, that of gatekeeping higher paid jobs in a globalized economy. A degree used to be an effective showstopper for upwards mobility, because not many could afford one. This might be europe specific, but conditions for undergrads from the middle class were abhorrent up until the mid 80s here in europe.
The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.
> The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status.
Because of the environment created by their parent generation. They're the ones pushing for ever more "professionalization" your honor! Where my parent's could have gone into the field I want to get into without a degree at my age, I have to graduate in order to attain any respect.
I think you completely missed the point that the authors were trying to make, which is that being in the top 10% of earners isn't as "secure" as you might think, you could easily fall out of that position, and almost everyone would benefit from a strong social safety net. This is as true in China as it is in the UK or the US.
>Apart from this being the entire point of globalization
>The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.
This is a rather old fashioned attitude. The United States has been furiously decoupling from China ever since Trump and that process has only accelerated since.
Russia has successfully decoupled from the entire western world. Mexico just became a larger trade partner for the US than China. We aren't globalizing, we are de-globalizing.
The jobs that fled to China will come back. The idea that they'll be returned to a robot is nothing more than investor copium - an uneducated presumption from people who have little to no understanding of what actually goes on in a Shenzhen factory.
In addition, Startups hire you as long as you have experience. We will see more of this in areas that don't require specific certifications.
>Russia has successfully decoupled from the entire western world.
Lol ask the Russian gov on where they plan on procuring chips after the war. Same for China. You need to be US allied to be allowed top notch silicon. In China this drives innovation at least, but Russia still hasn't been able to mass produce competitive silicon. Modern manufacturing processes are driven by automation, give it a decade and their industry will be lagging behind by a margin that's impossible to catch up.
Meanwhile, Western countries birth rates are declining.
I dont know what the solution is but this is the argument for the destruction of western civilization.
And maybe that would make a lot of people happy but I would not want to live in a world without things/ideas that Western civilization has created.
They (stupidly) would rather have all of a small, shrinking pie, rather than sticking with a smaller slice of a much, much larger pie. Even if they themselves would have been better off taking the smaller proportion.
Shenzen =/= all of China
Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work. We've seen how that plays out - the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues.
The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is much harder to game and also fairer.
This is missing the point. It's not the "mere existence" of the ultra-wealthy, it's that the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society. For example: "while the top 10 per cent grew its share of total income by 7.6 per cent between 1980 and 2018 (from 28.5 per cent to 36.1 per cent), the top 1 per cent grew theirs by 6.3 per cent (from 6.8 per cent to 13.1 per cent), which leaves only 1.3 per cent of share growth for the rest of the top 10 per cent."
> The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them.
That is the focus on the article. The point was that the top 10% are not necessarily raising their absolute living standards, because most of the income gains are going to the top 1%, inflation is rising, housing prices are rising, student loan debt is rising, existence in the top 10% is often only temporary and precarious (think layoffs and other economic trends), and as the article says, "The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status."
Someone can easily fall out of the top 10%. It's a lot more difficult to fall out of the top 1% and back into the working class. Wealth begets wealth.
What, do only the ultra-wealthy have smartphones? High level the big issue is overpopulation. At the pointy end of the stick we have the crusade against cheap energy.
You can blame the outcomes on the ultra-wealthy looking after themselves, but fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting. Picking the ultra-wealthy as a bogyman isn't going to fix things. The ultra-wealthy don't have huge storehouses of food to feed the hungry. They don't have 10 years supply of cheap gas for everyone. They can't magic cheap goods out of the air without someone else working to build them.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the incestuous relationship those religions have (both currently and historically) with the ultra-wealthy and other forms of aristocracy…
by what metric?
>It has degraded because a huge fraction of productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average people is now dedicated to improving the lives of the extremely wealthy.
1. define "huge fraction"
2. define "productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average". I want to see statistics for it. If you're talking about government spending, US government expenditures as percent of GDP is either flat or slowly creeping up[1] in the past few decades. Medicare spending[2] has been creeping up for years and far exceeds GDP growth.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/248073/distribution-of-m...
I know plenty of people earning around a median wage but no one who actually lives on that little. When you get median wage, or two, or three, you still need someone else to pay your bills.
My employees get 2-4x median wages and they do NOT live on that money alone (almost all of them moonlight elsewhere), and they are almost all struggling.
I am far in top 1% and when i saw what is the asking rent now i said to myself - "wow if i had to move now, that'll be a predicament". Ask any landlord if they are getting paid through the bank. Many won't even accept bank payment. They are paid in cash - and that cash hasn't been in the bank since many circulation loops ago. People are not poor. They are buying everything like crazy, economy is running so hot it can blow up any moment. They just don't report the money they make.
Pretty much yeah. Yes, it's having challenges due to de-industrialization and Brexit, but it's still one of the best job markets in Europe.
Alarmist articles make it sound like the UK is Africa or something.
Also, I live in the US not the UK, but I'd question whether most people in the median income range and certainly as you rise materially above that not only have significant non-salary money coming in but it's of a nature that isn't reported.
Around the same time this rice visualization went viral: https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw
Comically, I think I could order the scale with four hour delivery and count by weight faster than this person counted one at a time.
This is their thesis:
> The focus of this book is on the larger group between the 1% and the 10%. These are the managers and professionals of our media, business, the third sector, political parties and academia and are just as influential. However, many would not recognise themselves as high earners at all. In fact, earning around £60,000 a year in Britain places you in the top 10% of income earners. Maybe you’re surprised you fall into this category, or are not as far off as you thought. But despite this group’s relative advantage and comfort, these high earners don’t feel politically empowered. They worry about their income and are anxious about the future.
Uh, yes? Aren't these just trite observations? Professionals who earn somewhat higher than average salaries live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars and go on nicer holidays but they are still stuck working for a paycheck like almost everybody else.
I get the impression the authors badly wanted to write a book about about income inequality, a subject they feel strongly about, and then tried (and failed) to come up with something fresh to say.
The meta point here is that academia has become fiercely competitive and that's why you see books like these getting written. CV padding by people desperate for tenure. I sympathize, but also wonder if we need yet another book rehashing arguments about wealth and income inequality.
Why do there have to be new insights? Inequality has been a persistent problem, and it's only been getting worse. The problem needs to be consistently highlighted, not tossed under the rug.
It's like global warming. Researchers have known about it for a long time, and there are no "new insights" except that it continues to exist and is getting worse.
The new insight is that inequality keeps rising and the more we say "nothing new here" the more we boil the frog.
Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London.
I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio.
All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.
I doubt the big shots will let the housing market crash. The falling property prices are promoted as a negative in the media.
In Germany they're already propping it up to keep it from crashing because big real estate firms demand they can't loose and their political pawns will comply.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/struggling-german-pro...
Last year I believed interest rates would never rise to a level that would cause stock market crash but it happened. It was faster in the US but BoE also reluctantly is raising & market now pricing in 6-6.5% terminal.
Last year, I also believed Liz Truss would get away with 150B of energy subsidies by borrowing away. Because most politicians in the last decade have indeed got away with it. Rishi Sunak as FM spent 400B on furlough, covid loans and eat out to help out (idiotic idea imo). BUT, she didn't.
These events have changed my beliefs. Math is never wrong, just that sometimes market is so complex and economy goes through cycles that it seems illogical but eventually, it will all even out.
Silly article. It's basically claiming that since even the relatively well off are not doing so great nowadays due to inflation, etc. they may appreciate some wealth redistribution (to those even poorer) because they now understand inequality. (The article authors also imply inequality will lead to a revolt, aka. the stick).
Yeah, sure! You can bet the relatively well off which are feeling the economic heat will just love to pay more taxes and plunge even more rapidly on the economic ladder.
It was a really strange transition and kind of torpedoed the entire article.
If we just marked assets to book instead (which makes some sense because there's no way most whales could actually liquidate their holdings at their current price) the world's inequality would plummet.
Not really sure where I am going with this except to express surprise at what appears to be a massive wealth discrepancy between the US and what I had long considered its closest comparable economy. I had never really done the research though thus my surprise.
Percentile Single Individual Couple with no children Couple with two children under 14
10th £9,800 £14,600 £20,500
50th £19,700 £29,500 £41,300
90th £38,400 £57,400 £80,300
97th £59,700 £89,100 £124,700
Consider: would you rather increase the standard of living of the poorest by 2x if it meant also increasing it for the richest by 100x (increasing inequality) or would you rather decrease the standard of living of the richest by 100x and also the poorest by 2x (decreasing inequality). A lot of discourse around inequality seriously proposes the latter (out of ignorance rather than malice).
If you have a population whose happiness is culturally tied to the stereotypical "single-family house owner with a picket fence and 2.1 kids attending Ivy League schools" lifestyle, then your latter solution (where everyone gets poorer) might actually be preferable.
The top unequal countries according to wealth Gini 2019:
1. Netherlands 2. Russia 3. Sweden 4. United States 5. Brazil 6. Ukraine 7. Thailand 8. Denmark 9. Philippines 10. Saudi Arabia
The statistic I’d me more interested in is cumulative earnings adjusted for age + untaxed transfers/benefits (e.g. inheritance or public pension benefits).
Sometimes it is good to realize that those of us who work in tech are privileged.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
That wouldn't be in the top 10% in the US.
Inequality is skyrocketing, and the "labour" party has become tory, not even "tory light"...
But what do you do about it? Especially in America the rich are those in power, so they're not going to shift the needle against themselves.