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Charts about Wealth Inequality in America
- maxxxxx 9y agoThe second chart is all you need to look at. It can't be healthy for a society if only the top few percent see any income gains and for the rest incomes stagnate.
- mac01021 9y agoIt may be all you need to look at if your goal is merely to scoff at the state of affairs and reaffirm your egalitarian self-identity. If you want to thoroughly understand the problem so that you can reason intelligently about what a solution might look like, you'll probably want more data.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoHow can that be interpreted in a positive light to have all of the economic gains of a country going to a small few?
- thehardsphere 9y agoBecause "income" does not equal "all of the economic gains of a country." Lots of other things happened in the period in that graph which kept median incomes lower despite economic improvements taking place. Like: 1. The offering of health insurance as a tax-free employment benefit. 2. An increase in divorce rates (households all over cut in half but the median household income didn't drop; there must have been an economic gain distributed to not-rich people for this to happen). Also, this graph doesn’t say anything about what happened to the size of each of these groups. Pretty sure the biggest trend in America has been the middle class splitting in half between people making more money (and thus becoming part of the "small few") and people making less (which worsens income inequality even though more people are now "rich"). So yeah, there's a lot missing from these graphs.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoThe goal of the graph is to generalize large scale income distributions/gains on a large sample size of hundreds of millions of people. Not to go into every single micro sub group of income earners and divorced neurologists with company sponsored health insurance who have more income than an tech worker homeowner with 6 cats. The graph is perfectly valid for what it represents. The share on a large sample size of hundreds of millions of people of historical income gains and results can be interpreted thusly.
- rbcgerard 9y agoI do t think these charts take into account benefits (I.e. Health insurance) which means that for many people income has not grown, but total compensation has grown, those workers just didn't get to choose where to spend it...
- maxxxxx 9y agoIn my view health care should be added to inflation. Then the chart would look even worse
- thehardsphere 9y agoInflation is a monetary phenomenon that affects all prices in the economy. If there's only a price increase in one sector it's by definition not inflation.
- crdoconnor 9y agoNot true. When the oil crisis hit in the 70s for example, inflation spiked. OPEC wasn't a monetary phenomenon.
- thehardsphere 9y agoOPEC did not cause the inflation, nor did the increasing price of oil. During the same period, the US fully abandoned the gold standard and the Federal Reserve pursued a policy of loose money. Here's a brief history: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/1970s-great-inflation.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/1970s-grea...
- pmiller2 9y agoIn that case, think of that chart as representing "buying power," rather than "income."
- cheald 9y ago
- habosa 9y agoWow. Much of this I knew but one thing that shocked me is that the 10th percentile of wealth in this country is a family with NEGATIVE $2000. If you were dropped into Nebraska from a meteor with nothing in your pocket you wouldn't even be in the bottom tenth. A sad state of affairs for the "greatest country in the world".
- DarkKomunalec 9y ago"dropped into Nebraska from a meteor" Don't you mean Kansas?
- brianwawok 9y agoWant to do a survey of how many people in that bottom tenth have an iPhone?
- collyw 9y agoiPhones are cheap when they are not purchased new.
- habosa 9y agoA $600 iPhone is probably one of the best investments you can make if you want to participate in modern society.
- mywittyname 9y agoAgreed. And iPhones have been around for like a decade and over a billion of them have been produced, so there are plenty of cheap used versions available.
- sokoloff 9y agoA $150 iPhone 5S is likely a better choice for someone in the bottom 1/10th of wealth.
- cylinder 9y agoWant to do a survey of how many people in that bottom tenth have faced massive out of pocket expenses for healthcare and insurance premiums?
- Aron 9y agoProbably the best bet here is to create mechanisms such that wealthy people who possess an abundance of caring and money can donate that money to the less fortunate, which would have the side effect of levelling the field, and the bonus of not impinging on anyone's liberties.
- DarkKomunalec 9y agoPretty sure they already can, but it's not enough, and you end up with a society where the more selfish you are, the more money->power you have. Tragedy of the commons is not a new concept.
- thehardsphere 9y agoThat's not a Tragedy of the Commons. Tragedy of the Commons is what happens when nobody clearly owns something that many people use, so none of them use it responsibly. That's not relevant at all to people hoarding their own wealth.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> That's not a Tragedy of the Commons. GPs example is exactly game-theoretix tragedy of the commons / prisoners dilemma. > Tragedy of the Commons is what happens when nobody clearly owns something that many people use, so none of them use it responsibly. It's specifically, originally, a term for overgrazing a pastureland resulting from the kind of arrangement you described; there are a number of generalizations from that example which have been given the name, including both the one you describe, and the even more general condition in which each player has a dominant strategy of defection even though all players cooperating has a better payoff than all defecting.
- thehardsphere 9y agoThe fact that Tragedy of the Commons is a subset of game theory defection problems does not change the fact that its defining requirement is the existence of a "Commons." The Commons need not be an overgrazed pastureland; it can be any open access resource. The best modern example would be Earth's atmosphere and how its being filled with pollution. GGP has not specified a Commons and the existence of one is not implied in his comment.
- jaclaz 9y agoSide note, in graph 5 the middle one is the "Non-Hispanic African American" category ... ... and have a look at the "data" underneath, a three line set of data with two values coming from Melissa (link to another "local" .xlsx) and a third one which is just a number. Most probably correct calculations, but no real way to check.
- Camillo 9y agoWhere are the Asians on these graphs?
- thehardsphere 9y agoShush, you're going to ruin the scam for everyone else. ;)