As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only solace is I'll probably be long dead by the time that happens.
His wealth was mainly in very illiquid land. A lot of it was near worthless unless US won the war since it was beyond the line drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and white settlers were generally banned from settling there.
Otherwise like many landholders back in the day he was semi-broke and had limited access to cash.
Of course after the war of course he was both compensated for his expenses and got “his” land in Ohio (more or less)
Is that true ?
As far as I am aware, the money the French Government alone loaned to the US during the revolutionary war (at least two million dollars[0]) far exceeded the value of Washington personal wealth (estimated at $780,000 in 1799 [1], so at the time of his death, not during the war).
And this is not counting all the loans made from other foreign sources (the Spanish Government and private Dutch investors), and the money raised directly by the Continental Congress.
Also, as others have said, it would have been almost impossible to liquidate his assets (his lands and his slaves) during the war - the problem was availability of cash, not wealth.
[0] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/loans [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_George_Washington#...
Smaller groups you can outright kill in daylight, but better to get to them first to torture and kill them out of sight.
Once you need to kill 500.000 who are protesting and if violence to quell the hoards wakes up more people who want to see the regime fail.
Literally all the founding fathers stood to be wealthier by getting the colonies to work with Britain than against it. Like, this is basic fucking math. Dragging armies across the economy you do business in with the end result being you are on your own and can no longer rely on the dominant economic power for protection and trade agreements and whatnot is not how you get fabulously rich if you are already starting from "not peasant".
If you want to look at them through an economic lens the right one to choose is "the founding fathers were rich enough that they knew that even if revolution was bad on a macro level they'd still be filthy rich and wouldn't starve"
>But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
I think you need to look at more revolutions. What tends to happen is a shuffling of the people who are already on top and the "HN class" of high end professionals, academics, media personalities, business leaders and other "peasants who are critical to the system" wind up in the gulags or losing their heads because the "fungible peasants" are pissed off at them for really squeezing out every penny until the system collapsed.
That was a rebellion, not a revolution. The colonial elite broke away from the mother country. They sculpted the eventual legal and political structure to protect their power and privilege without having to pay taxes.
If you're looking for a revolution, better look at the French Revolution or the October Revolution.
At least Bukele seems to get this. As does the IMF, as evidenced by their panicked attempt to shut him down.
No rush in any case though; the people who understand Bitcoin the best are those that need to, and rapid adoption is just a stressor on those building out the rails.
That’s a rather skewed take. You might see what Washington himself said about becoming that leader.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-pr...
George Washington wasn’t a signer of the Declaration of Independence either, so this idea that he concocted the revolution for personal gain is silly. He was appointed to lead the Continental Army by John Adams because of Washington’s military experience and his being from Virginia which was an asset in unifying the colonies.
I agree. Too often 'revolutions' are framed as though common people were responsible for it - because it appeals to the modern day 'peasants' ( the 'middle' class and below) ideas of a 'fair' society. They are just pawns in a larger game and they are oblivious to it.
They could vote for lefties like Corbyn or Bernie but they don't because things aren't that bad.
> 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War
Could you provide some support for this claim?
I believe it will help me deal with the current doomsday news (and be more stoic in general).
A lot of revolutions were carried out by people with very little resources - Mao led his army from under-developed hills, the October Revolution didn't have much of an industrial base either, nor did the left in the Spanish civil war (although the military eventually won, but hey, they had a fighting chance).
And aside from that, many revolutions happen relatively peacefully. For example Chile or South Africa. Although the latter case did have some violence and property destruction.
And aside from that, guns in the USA (assuming we're talking about this and not Europe) are cheap and plentiful. And a large, determined, but poorly-armed opposition has often beaten the smaller, well-armed forces of decadent states in the past.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that though - even a peaceful movement can succeed if it's widespread.
The feds are bleeding us dry to line they and their corrupt friends pockets and their public debt.
This suggests that taxing the slaves would have better helped the poor. Was it helping them before the war? Were the poor suddenly worse off because of the revolution?
> it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
Do George Washington's heirs control a significant portion of today's wealth?
Won't happen in a society where elders are more numerous than young. In the past it required a lot of young males thinking they have not much to lose, but they are becoming extinct.
Old people won't revolt, middle-aged fathers that need to think of their children and mortgage won't revolt.
If you are a landless peasant you know if you are being too heavily taxes - you can see how much the land produces. People have no idea whether they are overpaying for food at the end of a long supply chain, let alone for technology.
Another factor is when you are paying for many things, its only worth worrying about the most expensive as the others are relatively trivial. Compared to housing and utilities the rest is hardly worth thinking about.
That said, the subscriptions do keep growing. But, in fairness, most cloud services have ongoing cost to the business, so ongoing consumer costs make sense.
It's not so much "inequality is evil" (tho he surely think so), but rather "inequality breeds catastrophic revolutions".
Source? I have some doubts about this claim. Are you sure this doesn't simply measure one form of labor while ignoring another?
Inequality doesn’t matter really nowadays. There will be no revolution as most of people are out of poverty despite what narration on the internet is.
Living conditions as today day poor person are immensely better than 18 or 19th century peasants.
Whoever has billions does not affect me having running water in faucets and me enjoying life.
Warm water is not all there is to life but it is a lot.
Whether or not people are in subsistence poverty is not the only measure of a functioning society. It's great that extreme poverty is going down, but let's not declare Mission Accomplished just yet. The existence of billionaires might not affect your running water, but it does distort the market and negatively affect how much everything around you costs, from housing to healthcare to groceries. The existence of billionaires also affects your share of power in democracy. A billionaire is right now, running amok, griefing workers and tearing down institutions. All because his billions bought him the power to do that.
You might change your "billionaires existing doesn't bother me" Enlightened Apathy if they one day kill a government service you rely on or decide your job must end because they need double digit stock growth again this year.
People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem.
At worst we will get an angry mob stampeding the White House with no real direction or objective. Are rich people the problem or is it the government? They may have a feeling "something" is wrong, but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, or they may think that nothing is wrong and life is just hard.
Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.
Its just amazing as an outsider to see the other side calling Trump voters they don't understand what they voted for.
"Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it.
"Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause? Let's consider how that happens:
When you buy something for $100, part of that money goes to labor (the employees who made or distributed it etc.) and part goes to capital (the investors who own the company). Employees generally spend all of their income, so that's not an issue. As it turns out, so do most investors, by population count, because most businesses are small businesses. The owner of the local salon might be getting a dividend from the place but she's using that to buy groceries.
Then there's Larry Ellison. Screw that guy, am I right? Somehow that asshole has more money than it would take to buy the entirety of Boeing with enough left over to buy General Motors and Halliburton put together. And he's not spending it fast enough to make the number go down instead of up.
But wait, how did that happen? He definitely didn't end up with $200B by investing $100 in the Dow and letting it compound for 50 years.
His company did, however, get billions of dollars in government contracts and in general makes its money by selling copyright licenses to its 50 year old database software. In fact, if you look at the list of companies minting all of these billionaires, they're almost all tech companies, relying on a government-granted copyright monopoly that originally expired after 14 years.
And if you look at the ones that aren't tech, they're drug companies (another government-granted monopoly and an industry that has thoroughly captured the regulators) and finance companies (possibly the only industry with more regulatory capture than medicine).
From this we can notice a trend. You get billionaires when the laws impair competition in their industry and the industry consolidates into megacorps. So that's the cause. That's what you need to prevent.
What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained?
Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.
It seems like a symptom. Primarily because "wealth management" does seem to be a skill. So the expectation would be that even if you equalized all wealth tomorrow and suddenly educated everyone to the same level in it's management then in a very short time a large imbalance would again be created.
> but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame,
It's impossible to acknowledge that both of you are most likely equally wrong but just in different directions? If you worked together you'd get much further yet you can't even grant them basic personal agency. What a bummer. Inequality abounds.
People's wealth were more geographically locked and tied to land back then.
And nuclear. We have yet to see our first nuclear civil war.
_very_ slightly edited from its original.
Right now it looks like wealth is self-enforcing. Across certain thresholds, you can get an expert or have the network to help with your taxes, legal issues, investment strategy and so on. Maybe you even inherited it all from your parents. There are certainly prominent counter examples of people who crossed these thresholds with their own hard work. The majority of people does not.
For a more snappier version, see this video by a former professor of history, university of Wisconsin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
And in the case of the US, you have people who willingly vote against their interest by demonizing other groups.
I disagree, people were even more brainwashed in the past since their only source of information was what the church and the king would tell them (Plato's cave allegory) while now you have a plethora of independent unbiased sources of information plus leaks and whistleblowers out in the open to thanks to the internet and social media.
Sure, you have a lot of fake news and propaganda today form the mainstream and social media, but back then it was all exclusively fake news and propaganda, as only the ruling elites had the truth and they'd never share that with the peasants, while any peasantry who dared speaking the truth that went against the official narrative would be punished for heresy. That's why Europe spent so much time in the dark ages and the advent of freedom of thought also brought in the Renaissance era.
>When the brain is chained, there is no hope for a revolution.
I disagree, people in the west today have a lot more freedom of information and freedom of speech than in the distant past. Well, unless you live in the UK or Germany where the police arrests you for posting a meme online about a politician, try to ban encrypted chat and sources of information they consider "hateful" in order to control the narrative and restrict the population to only vote for the entrenched establishment.
at no time has there been a good outcome from which this change made.
The people who applied the force merely swapped with those who had wealth. Essentially, they wanted the wealth, and co-opted the masses to enable themselves.
What we have today is relatively good. Just because you see some billionaire who have more yachts than you could ever hope to own, doesn't mean you aren't living a good life. At least the french revolution was in part about lack of food and starvation. I dont see america starving.
unless you're in the bottom 50%
> I dont see america starving.
True, but starvation is a pretty low bar; obesity and all the related health problems due to an unhealthy diet (because garbage is the cheapest food and what the bottom 50% can afford in the US) is the modern version of starvation
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hunger-us-continued-multi-y...
> Hunger reached its highest point in the United States in nearly a decade last year, with 18 million households, or 13.5%, struggling at some point to secure enough food, a Department of Agriculture report released on Wednesday said.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america
I mean, sure, they are not "staring", it's only hunger...
The pendulum metaphor fails often; here are some examples where it cannot make sensible predictions: species level extinction; major technological shifts; the overall growth of economies (upward), the growth of attitudes around human rights.
Why does the pendulum metaphor fail? It has no explanatory ability to handle non-cyclic things. Mathematically, it has too few degrees of freedom and a poor functional form.
How often does the pendulum argument make a testable prediction? Is there a prediction of _when_ something will happen? Is there a scientific study (or even statistical analysis) of the underlying factors?
The pendulum argument often serves as some kind of wishful thinking; just wait, it says, and things will (somehow) “swing back” to the middle. For a while, at least, until there is some kind of overreaction.
Enough. Let’s call bullsh-t on this vague metaphor. There are better ways of thinking.
(In contrast, the statistical concept of “reversion to the mean” is a mathematical fact. Using it when observing real world data helps us assess the nature of the underlying statistical distributions.)
The alternative is returning to a feudal gilded age where there are a very very small cabal of asset owning lords, a very small class of scribes for the lords, and then a sea of serfs.
The whole concept of wealth accumulation is entirely human-made, and influenced by what the society is willing to tolerate.
It only becomes a problem if people are miserable, the palace stops being a beautiful landmark and becomes a symbol of oppression.
Back to stocks, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with the top 10% owning 87% of the stocks (in the US, because apparently, the rest of the world doesn't exist...). The stock market is risky, that's really a thing for those who have all their basic needs covered and can afford to lose big. Owning stock i.e. investing in companies is also among the most best things to society the rich can do, compared to, say, building palaces for themselves.
All that to say that if some causes are worth revolting against, I just don't think inequality in stock ownership is one of them.
Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.
Absolutely enormous amounts of money.
I’m still “waiting” for the GFC to correct the Australian housing market…
QE was not, but, you know, everyone who owns assets or had a job turned out to be a beneficiary of it.
At least in Finland today it's much easier for young people to buy their 1st home now compared to 15 years ago. Interest rates are roughly where they were 15 years ago, but house prices in real terms have gone way down. There's also huge market asymmetry with large amount of vacant properties that nobody wants to buy, and relatively few buyers.
So why is it different in Finland? Is there a lot of free space around then cities? Or doesn't everyone want to live in Helsinki?
A market crash like that would result in extremely broad layoffs, major global supply chain instabilities, and a cataclysmic knock on effect of capital losses into nearly every walk of life on earth.
Not to mention, as many already have, the federal govt would undoubtedly bail out the worst actors and leave the poor to fend for themselves.
Just yesterday the Treasury Department announced they aren’t going to enforce a money laundering law. You think they’re going to New Deal a major crash’s now? No way.
The top 10% aren’t losing their jobs in a crash, but the bottom 50% might.
So while the top 10% keeps investing and will maximize the recovery, the bottom 50% will cash out at the bottom and won’t return to invest for years after their emergency fund has recovered.
I've never felt that I am entitled to any sort of property even when being software engineer to the core, even more a house, as a young person right after university. That was always a hard-won luxury, and I don't even mean some extremely well located place.
Some folks here often mention similar stuff and refer to some period in 50s/60s in US specifically where 1 salary could have done it in some more rural areas. Nobody mentions how rest of the population looked like, hardly whole US population was buying new houses with wife being stay-at-home mum.
When women started going to work too, suddenly such couples quickly outcompeted single earners from housing market. In Europe, this stay-at-home was never the thing in most places so we never even had such period, thus 0 such expectations. Properties, especially houses, were always a hard-won luxury.
Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly.
They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.
Not to mention none of them had to go to the Nuremberg trials...
It's their system, it's their game.
> They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.
Yes, these families exist. But there is an equal amount of them that went to the poorhouse that you don't know about. Many German Nazis that got wealthy through stealing/grafting of Jewish businesses _did_ lose their assets. Others still stayed somewhat wealthy but are now just barely millionaires.
It's very easy to get fooled by survivorship bias, since it's only the companies and people that are still wealthy that get heavily covered. I don't think a publisher would accept a book like Nazi Billionaires about all the people that are no longer relevant at all.
edit: I have to say, I also think it's terrible that so many people could just go on like nothing happened. Doubly so for the bureaucracy, diplomats and judges -- both in Germany and the Axis collaborators.
But this is how the world goes. The only people punished for the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward or the Gulags were those caught up in internal purges. The new Syrian government threw a few of the worst people in Jail, but cannot dismiss everyone involved in the old system for practical reasons. The Architects and executors of British and Dutch "counter-insurgency" strategies to keep their colonies have Barracks named after them. I could go on with American examples but I think we all know.
Or eventually get the parents house from generation to generation.
What's happened is a massive shift from a small-scale agricultural economy to a mix of urban and large-scale agriculture, and the building of homes/apartments hasn't kept pace.
in the great depression, the crash did reduce inequality
in the covid19, the crash increased inequality
my opinion is that nowadays, fortune is highly financialized.
during a crisis, for most(99.99%) ordinary people who are in the market, they suffer the real lose, and they have nothing to comeback, even have to sell their assets to pay their bills, all they can get from the goverment is something like food banks, or the best situation, get a job to sell their labor
but for certain people either hold enough cash or can obtain enough cash from government relief programs, putting them in a position of advantage, this enables them to quickly reap a large amount of wealth during an economic crisis.
If you're not rich but invested whatever you could over the course of your life and now the market tanks to where you've lost half (or more) of what you had then someone else is going to win that from you.
A massively rich company can hold out a lot longer than a software developer who tucked away what they could over the years. If a real crash happens that software developer just got 30 years of their net worth mostly vaporized in a few months.
How much of the population is in that category? It's the whole middle class basically. It's a crushing blow to most folks when the market crashes for a long period of time. It's even worse for folks who are already in a position of barely scraping by while putting a little bit aside whenever they can. That person is destroyed if a majority of that disappears because they may have to sell it off on the spot just to survive because if the market really crashes, you can be sure a ton of people are going to be out of work.
A billionaire with $200B in wealth could lose 99% of that and still have $2B, generational wealth that will perpetually fund an entire family tree down to great great grandchildren.
I personally think that the Fed papers are just designed as an excuse to print money, but my point is the Fed is very far from seeing this as a problem and will never act to remedy it.
It would probably make it harder if it were anything like 2008.
The issue with housing is that throughout the Western world we've made it incredibly difficult to get new housing built.
Imagine if everyones socks were suddenly valued a million bucks, except yours. Would you "stay in the same place" or would you suddenly be too poor to afford to buy the labor of all the newly minted millionaires? I'd bet on the latter.
It also causes a lot of companies to go out of business or reduce their workforce because of reduced consumer spending, hurting the working class more.
They are only scared of one thing.
This would assume rich people have all their money in stocks, which is not correct.
Lina Khan types need solid support and fire power to make a dent.
Congress will not let the stock market crash because they are #1 insider traders.
Here's a recipe for happiness: stop comparing yourself to others and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. It's old advice, but it's clearly been forgotten.
cheap products from 3rd world
cheap nature resources from 3rd world
cheap labor from 3rd world
that's why many of the free citizens of the Empire don't need to care about inequality at all
when these things change, you will care
Have you.. lived in other countries? I came here from southeast Asia and yes, my BigTech salary affords me a comfortable life, but I simply don't understand why the bottom 90% aren't up in arms over here.
Instead we should be looking at the cups below us who can barely get by their salary
Well the idea is that (correctly or incorrectly) lower inequality would result in significantly higher absolute living standards.
Arguably they had been going up at the pace they have over the last several decades almost entirely due to technological progress (and more arguably globalization/free trade).
Average productivity has been in increasing at a much faster rate than median or below median absolute living standards. Growing inequality is possibly the main culprit.
> looking in the other guy's cup
Well hard not to do that when the other guy has turned off the tap after filling his cup..
It could be way worse but it could also be better. There are people in the U.S without good health care or access to dignified jobs (or at least - a livable salary). These are issues that can be improved by a lot, it's not a law of nature.
That amounts to cultural and political hegemony. Telling people to accept that is a little like telling them to know their place.
Historically, one of the major turning points in the cycles of society/governments is when there is massive inequitable distribution of wealth such that the masses are left to divvy up a tiny piece of the pie while the top .05% hoard 80+% of the wealth. IMO we are currently seeing the wealthiest people on earth taking over the levers of the US government and it is unlikely we will ever return to the constitutional democracy we used to have. Moving forward Elon Musk and the other members of his Gothic MAGA will decide how much the government can spend each year and on what and for whose benefit.
A very, very different scenario than being envious of the sports car in your neighbor's driveway.
Is there any discussion/research/case study analysis where this is explored? I.e. overall citizen satisfaction/economic productivity and how it relates to wealth distribution?
(Although, I guess if your metric is "citizen satisfaction" maybe that's not as terrible).
In any case, there are lots of case studies showing what happens at the extreme inequality end of the spectrum. As I mentioned in another comment, my favorites come from Piketty "Capital in the 21st Century" and Acemoglu & Robinson "Why Nations Fail".
In the latter, the case study on the rise and fall of Venice is particularly fascinating - huge economic growth due to inclusive economic institutions that promoted social mobility, followed by a downturn once the aristocracy moved to entrench their own interests at society's expense. This seems to be the central thesis of the book, although I'm only a few chapters in.
The parallels with modern US politics are pretty hard to ignore though.
Not in any kind. It is absolutely the case, if there's mostly untaxed generational wealth transfer. Imagine this - you are born in this world with nothing. And every parcel of land and property is owned by somebody - somebody who with high likelihood inherited it or hundreds of millions or billions of assets on spawn.
Now obviously, you can inherit all sorts of other factors too - like very valuable social networks and a set of trade skills carefully passed down and tought. But even neglecting those, the largely untaxed generational wealth transfer would naturally lead to massive inequalities and disproportionate amounts of wealth concentrated in few families.
My point was that pointing out "Top x% own Top x+y% of good z" doesn't say anything meaningful without contextualizing why (if) this is a bad thing, and what x and y should be for a given z.
The upshot is that wealth inequality is above or close to historical high points and that it has actual and severe real world negative consequences.
When there’s massive inequality in the system, the super rich will compete with you for resources. Resources can include:
- Housing, of which fewer and fewer people could afford owning at the median income level
- Education, think buying access to spots at top schools and the ability to afford the fees/debt
- Political power, think Elon Musk in the western world
- Media/consensus, think Jeff Bezos, and think blaming of immigrants for house prices
- In the current tax system, the super rich could inherit wealth while paying very little tax, and they can borrow money at very low rates collaterized with the massive amounts of assets their own: meanwhile some of us pay a 30-50% tax on our income and are struggling to save for a downpayment or retirement.
With the massive financial power of the super rich, it’s not so much that this is bad in an “evil” way. Rather, it’s bad for the rest of us because the super rich are indifferent to us in pursuit of their own agendas in the “cosmic indifference” kind of way. Just as how we humans destroy anthills with an indifference if they get in the way of road constructions, the super rich would “run over” us if it benefits them.
Just looking "more uniform" would be a great starting point. The optimal distribution is left as an open question for future research.
Not having the perfect solution upfront should not block incremental improvements, which is more or less what is happening ATM. E.g. people argue we cannot have free healthcare because the proverbial "welfare queen" will also receive it.
What makes you think the optimal distribution is "more uniform" rather than less? I'm not taking sides in this question, simply pointing out that the headline is rather meaningless without context
At the same time, one could imagine a situation where wealth is so abundant that even the lowest 1% could afford any modern luxury. In that case it probably wouldn't be so bad if the top few wealthiest individuals had enough money to buy and own whole planets. They would likely use their wealth to make life worse for others, as they tend to, but that's out of the scope of this model.
Every scaled up platforms then gets trapped into collecting/selling personal data and flooding the field with Ads (and obviously in these ad auctions the 10% can outbid the majority so Ad prices keep rising).
Comparatively, you need to earn $663,164 to be in the top 1%, and more than $3M to be in the top 0.1%.
I just want to highlight this to remind that the top 10% is by far not made up exclusively of ultra-rich individuals like people on internet like to believe.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...
It paints a pretty poor picture of what is possible. I met many uneducated immigrants on a fish processing boat in the Bering Sea making 10k a month, a job usually begging for people. They would show me pictures of their wives and children living well.
The former is less meaningful as it ignores your cost of living.
The majority of people who earn a top 1% income only manage to do so for a short period.
As a consequence the overlap between top 1% by income and by wealth is small. They are (broadly speaking) different groups.
It's VERY effective.
Anyway, if anything the distribution based on wealth would even more starkly be hyper-focused at the top, the people in the 10-9% range aren't exactly sitting on mountains of gold.
There's two ways to stay the richest man in the world:
a) Get more money.
b) Stop people from getting more money than you.
And I suppose c) Do both. If that's what you are about.
A lot of people characterize corporations as a sociopath because it expresses a lot of clinical markers. I think if you frame the economy as war, you'll find similar markers. People are exhausted, shell shocked, constantly insecure, attrition or the feeling of attrition (feeling of no progress). PTSD from this everlasting war.
The number of Americans with passports is at an all time high of 48%, and some of that is simply for convenience ID for internal flights.
And you need both time and money for a vacation. The average American family probably can't take 2-3 weeks off to travel every year, which makes their vacations shorter and cheaper.
Also, Hotels and Airbnb's are incredibly expensive (even for me, working a decent job with a good income) for families. That's why i chose campings over hotels and bought a decent tent.
Yes, the vast majority of the US population has never traveled overseas. Many of those who do, do so once in a lifetime.
If you’re not rich, but spend more than rich people do on stuff, you’re going to have a hard time getting rich.
A lot of vacations also involve crashing at another family member or friends spare bedroom/fold out couch.
I grew up with family vacations like this (inflation adjusted) and I had a great time. It’s hard to wrap your mind around when you think vacations require significant travel.
Here's how I would sum up his main argument: Ordinary people have less money and can no longer afford to buy property. Governments have less money, infrastructure everywhere is eroding. So where does all the wealth go? The only possible answer is to the very rich, who are doing better than ever, while everyone else is down financially.
To be clear, this is not about the entrepreneur who made a couple million bucks and has three houses. It's about the top 0.1 % who are sucking everyone else dry, permanently: The poor, the middle class, and the government.
We need to do something to reverse this trend. And soon.
The big takeaway for me was that wealth inequality never improves without some major catastrophe (war, revolution, plague etc). The proposed model is really intuitive and compelling (tldr; return on capital has historically always been higher than real growth, which guarantees indefinite concentration of wealth until there's a crisis).
Last year's Nobel Economics Prize winners, Acemoglu and Robinson, tell a similar story in "Why Nations Fail", which I am working through at the moment. Although in their case, they seem be suggesting a more causal link between erosion of political and economic institutions and the collapse of empires.
I wish these ideas were more broadly accessible and understood. The real risk of total societal collapse should transcend any partisan fighting about ideal tax rates, government inflation/unemployment targets etc. Everyone has a common interest in there not being a violent upheaval (arguably the rich most of all).
Last I checked the numbers, current wealth inequality seems about as bad as it was before the great depression. And its not enough to just say "well, absolute wealth is more important". As others have pointed out, its not stable to have such huge relative wealth disparities. And that's before you even consider corruption.
> Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...
I didn't know Acemoglu got the Nobel Economics Prize.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distributi...
Wealth equality is not really a goal, it better to ask if the bottom 50% got wealthier in absolute terms, which the author answers in another post:
If you have no net wealth, but a Scandinavian-style social safety net (not just retirement income, but healthcare, free access to arts/culture/parks and so on), you can still live a good life.
"Does the 80th percentile have an outsize claim on lifelong wellbeing relative to the 20th percentile" is a better metric than just looking at bank balances.
Also have to consider age effects, to what extent people move naturally up and down through the centiles through early and late working life and retirement. Looking at net wealth centiles in isolation doesn't tell you very much about how a society works.
Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.
I know a lot of working class people with significant savings (more than I have) but they tend to just put it in a savings account at a bank or perhaps invest in a property to let out.
Many people see the stock market as a casino even though you have far less risk in index funds than you do by renting out property.
As for the slight drift in US wealth distribution since 1980, it’s wholly explained by the change in age demographics. Since 1980 we’ve gone from a nation of people 30 years old to 40 years old. 10 years is a lot of time when it comes to compounding returns on productive assets (stocks, etc). Due to compounding, wealth held by each age group also gets more Pareto-extreme heading into retirement age.
Adjust that out, and this is mostly a nothing burger. But emotionally people don’t feel that way so nothing I say will change that. Narrative zeitgeist always wins over objective reality.
Average Americans are wealthier than they've ever been. Another chart to drive this home, the percentage of Americans who have a passport since 1989 (Note, this is also influenced by age demographics, but not as dramatically as wealth): https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning...
Looking at averages is completely irrelevant when talking about inequality.
Here's a video from 12 years ago: Wealth Inequality in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
So, to not inconvenience these 3 individuals, you wont make a significant impact to the bottom 50% of US citizens.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...
And it has (in inflation-adjusted terms, lower income Americans have become richer over many decades).
As long as you have anything less than full reserve banking (and even there, the interest could be an issue if left unchecked -- perhaps why Islam and Christianity both ban its practice), this corruption of sound money will skew the playing field.
According to this source, 40 percent of US stock is owned by foreigners: https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-owns-us-stock-foreign...
Individual
- top quintile - $120k
- top 10% - $165k
Household
- top quintile - $167K
- top 10% - 235K
> "Wealth inequality is only getting worse in this country and frankly I’m not sure what stops this train."
Best trick is allowing the top 50% to hate the bottom 50% and naturally visa versa BUT ALSO have a huge portion of the bottom 50% to root and vote for the top.
It feels like this has been true just past stock market's inception.
> These numbers have all increased since 1989 as well — total wealth (60.8% to 67.3%), stocks (81.7% to 87.2%), private businesses (78.4% to 84.4%) and real estate (38.2% to 43.9%).
So no. It has not always been like this.
The US economy depends on those tech companies: try succeeding in a country that only has old school businesses: I remember the top stocks for France are terrifyingly old. I'm in New Zealand and we hardly have any tech stocks. Xero, RocketLabs? We often sell our successes overseas.
Edit: many of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b... are founders. Looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by... and too many of the businesses are over a century old, more than a few from the 1800s.
Edit: The irony of rich Americans talking about wealth inequality is harsh. There's billions of people that desperately want the resources that a poor US citizen spends. If you are American and want to talk about the wealthy, look at yourself and ask how your wealth should be taken from you and given to the poor of the world...
- Annual Global GDP: $105 trillion
- Cost to Feed Everyone for a Year: $10 trillion
The issue is not a lack of money but rather distribution, logistics, and political will.
Vote left and increase taxes for the rich?
it's also pointless to mention this out when, if you examine returns to public versus private markets from e.g. IPOs in the past twenty years, they are so radically lower than the twenty before. that trend is by no means abating. let's not get offended that more average joes aren't playing exit liquidity to some VC/PE guy. this is somewhat to be expected given the level of hell the government has made it to be publicly listed, the response of growing private markets, and the SEC's asinine refusal to allow anyone but rich people access to those privates.
My father is compulsive about accumulating wealth via stocks, property, etc.
My father in law could not care less about wealth accumulation, and would rather have lunch with friends outside of work.
I dont know who is happiest, but from the outside they both appear very content and satisfied.
Asking why is it wrong is similar to asking why it was wrong that most people couldn't read or write, for many of them were quite happy being illiterate.
Let's say hypothetically that the distribution of stock ownership was more even across the population, and variance was largely (but not completely) due to length of time in the workforce. And further, that the stock owned by workers is a large enough block that they effectively have controlling shares at many companies. Maybe I'm talking about a different universe, but please imagine it for a moment.
Would that hypothetical world be kind of like communism in the sense that the workers own the means of production? If not, why not?
That concep/idea is called: Universal Basic Dividend.
Let's talk about non-hypothetical real world, like Nordic model or Europe in general. Capitalism produces growth, redistribution (free healthcare, education, etc. spreads the wealth).
You can found one today if you want, don't need communism for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization
The thing is, it began like you described - but most people didnt see the value in it and sold it immediately; thats the reason why you have some oligarch caste, as this mainly got fueled by this process (sure, not the only source of their wealth but the understood back then how to play the game)
why don't work?
first, when equity dispersion is accompanied by the dispersion of decision-making power, it can lead to excessively high decision-making costs, reduced efficiency, and lack of competitiveness. However, when equity is dispersed but decision-making power is concentrated (i.e., a dual-class share structure), the interested parties with decision-making power tend to skew the benefits towards themselves.
it's not compatitalbe with the market-oriented economic system.
second, "Altruistic collectivization" is entropy-increasing.
For example, if a company does what you said, when a crisis occurs, it's hard for it to survive. Its products may fail to be sold, and the company may go bankrupt. Other companies can also go bankrupt, but their failure is part of the capitalist system. When they fail, the system as a whole doesn't necessarily fail. But when a "communist-style" company fails, it dies, and it won't come back easily.
More importantly, this is a world dominated by capitalism. It's not just an ideology of companies, it's an ideology of states. For example, when the IMF/WHO comes to a country that is suffering from a global capitalist economic crisis, the IMF will kindly offer its help, but with some conditions, such as requiring you to also accept its help in reforming your economic system.
Although there are still some similar commercial entities that are "owned" collectively, most of them are stagnant. They can survive, but they cannot expand.
And then use the income from that to distribute wealth through things like single payer health care, affordable housing etc. So the basic needed expenses don't take up such a large portion of the budget for middle income households.
Also: stronger unions.
To see how bad wealth inequality in the US is, look at this graph [0] from 2023 and see if you feel any different.
0 - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-amer...
Right now, the Oligarchs (yes, we have them) are in the process of dismantling the public sector. During this process they have access to all the know-how and data. (That is a form of public-IP theft in broad daylight, btw.)
Then, when quite predictably the shit hits the fan -- as we all know many of these components of the public estate are critical services -- these same oligarchs will create private companies and "our government" will contract out these very same services to the private sector.
And yes, having thrown both baby and the bathwater into the jobless market, they also are building up the uber rolodex of competent ex-civil servants. Many, naturally, will end up working for the very same oligarchs that fired them.
It is an error in my opinion to utilize a partisan lens when considering what is happening to our nation. Trump, Elon, Thiel, and their youth shock troops are floatsome that are riding a wave that is cresting now, but the wave was set in motion during 90s when barriers erected to prevent concentration of Media and Finance in few hands were taken down by the governer from Cocaine Central. The red-blue circus is just that in my opinion.
Perhaps to save it Just give a few trillion to the people in msci world stock locked for ten years or so to teach them.
Not elsewhere.
It's only going to get worse.
The biggest reason it can't be stopped is because 1/2 of the bottom 90% of the population is screaming to get rid of social security, because... it's socialism!
Never mind that they have $0 saved for retirement. When you combine a sociopathic wealth class, and a multi-decade education deprived working class, it's a win-win for ever increasing wealth inequality.
For many in the top 10%, this is considered a good thing...
On a personal level, sure, that's responsible (for whoever can actually afford to do that), but if everyone is living frugally and don't spend that much money at all, doesn't that have pretty horrible effects on the numerous businesses that actually need consumers?
Most poor people are just earning enough to live day by day. Getting financial literacy would help little.
Which is to say that neo-liberal patches like “you’re poor because you’re financially illiterate!” need to go, a real structural reform must be put in place in most of the Western world.
Do they teach in school how to invest when you can barely afford food and have no disposable income? Must be easy to talk shit when sitting on your cushy white collar job.
Stop simping for billionaires, it’s pathetic.
