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You don’t have to wonder. The data is out there. While there are “more millionaires” than before, that’s a bogus metric due to inflation. You have to look at c
by ebbv 8y ago
You don’t have to wonder. The data is out there.
While there are “more millionaires” than before, that’s a bogus metric due to inflation. You have to look at concentration of wealth as a percentage and a ratio between. Wealthy and poor and “middle class”.
If you do that it’s obvious what the issue is; wages have stayed very flat for the poor and middle class and almost all wealth gain has been concentrated in the top very few percent. Because most wealth gain is happening in finance and investing, and like I said wages have stayed flat for many decades.
- ianai 8y agoI personally experienced this recently. I spent 2009-2014 unemployed. Anything I purchased was a painful life choice. Now that I’ve been employed for years, that feeling persists mostly. Much of what I earn is soaked up by financial obligations to financial institutions. That includes rent, utilities, and insurances. Insurance is even taken out of my pay before I’m paid! I lump utilizes into that as they’re often finances with bonds and amount to an obligation I simply cannot do without. Add to that the opportunity cost of working 80 hrs per paycheck. I’m simply on the wrong side of the finance industry.
- sgt101 8y agoAlso "middle class" in the USA is used to talk about what is known as "working class" in most of the rest of the world.
- grzm 8y agoI hear both used to refer to different segments in the US. Do you have a reference for the translation you describe?
- sokoloff 8y agoWhy wouldn't wages stay flat for the poor and [bottom half of the] middle class? I think of the value of a dollar as pegged to the value of an hour of undifferentiated labor rather than pegged to an ounce of gold or barrel of oil. (Said differently, basic wages and inflation are tied to each other: inflation of wages is linked roughly linearly to inflation of prices.) People selling hours of labor are selling those hours in some ratio of dollars and that's what their labor is worth. What's happening on the high end is that advances in technology, finance, and manufacturing have made gains in excess of inflation, and under that set of conditions, of course wealth flows to the owners of those advances. (I'm not saying that what we have today is exactly right, but I'm sharing my mental model of why it's entirely unsurprising.)