20 ms·

The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

248 points by noonespecial 8y ago

josephby 8y ago
Dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Birth%20of%20the%20New%20American%20Aristocracy&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Birth%20of%20the%20New%2...
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Apparently if it didn't create meaningful discussion it isn't a dupe.
anbende 8y ago
Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the much of the wealth in the 9.9 is going to actually be in that top .9. In other words, the author just divides the top 1% into two pieces, and lumps one of them in with “the 9.9”. Edit: I did a little research and math. The top 1% holds 40% of US wealth. The top 10% holds 77%. That’s 37% to “the 9%”. I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.
- danharaj 8y ago
  Right, it obfuscates class distinctions between those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money. I'm somewhat cynical but I think this is an intended obfuscation. It's important for petit bourgeois and wealthy skilled workers to understand their position in the class hierarchy, but calling a class whose power is dwarfed by the capitalist class an aristocracy is fluffy rhetoric.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    > those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money Controlling policy is one thing. Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? Anyone who has money actually has some sort of capital or an equivalently powerful financial instrument be it stocks, loans to other companies, government bonds, a house, etc.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      Just because you own, e.g. stock doesn't mean you control the underlying means of production it represents a share of. Most people who own stock do so as part of a retirement fund. Those institutional investors, banks, managers, politicians, corporate board members, CEO's, etc. Are the ones who actually control capital. It should be emphasized that a lot of how capitalism runs these days is in the hands of huge bureaucracies that comprise people but don't quite act like people. There is a small class of people who operate at that level as individuals: these are the capitalist class. This is an important distinction, don't you think?
      - djajshgsjja 8y ago
        All those people you listed are still cogs in the machine, to varying degrees. The CEOs are beholden to the boards, who are beholden to the institutional investors, who manage my 401k. Certainly, the CEOs have higher leverage over the system on an individual basis. But anyone whose wealth is increasing mainly through return on capital is a member, if not a leader, of the capitalist class.
        danharaj 8y ago
        Sure, they're all beholden to each other but they're the ones who make the decisions about how to allocate the means of production and which labor power to buy. People who derive their income primarily from investments but don't really decide anything or buy labor power are a rung below those who do. Taxonomize it however you want provided the distinction remains.
- auggierose 8y ago
  If you can't afford a superyacht, you are probably not Aristocracy.
- zaroth 8y ago
  Not surprisingly, every time you zoom into an exponential distribution you will find... an exponential distribution.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  Divide and conquer. I think someone finds it convenient to break up the 99% narrative. It's very similar to the excoriation of public employees unions who negotiate solid living wages for their members - it makes too much of a contrast for many who are on basically a subsidence living in the private industry
- beager 8y ago
  I think the point TFA was making is that the 9.9% hasn’t experienced a decline in wealth in order to feed the accretion of wealth in the top 0.1%, and that such a situation creates an aristocratic attitude among that 9.9%, dulling any motivation to fix wealth inequality or economic immobility in the bottom 90%. I believe that the term 9.9% is a slogan though.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    The difference between comfort and struggle, hmm? Three real question is what the 9.8% can do even if completely united to fix the problem that the top 0.1% cannot stop. Unless you mean politicians (who are typically in top) - because power and wealth are related but nor equivalent - and transferable plus exchangeable.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jokoon 8y ago
  I disagree. What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income. Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless. You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but since I AM NOT AT THE TOP, YOU CANNOT BLAME ME, so blame the richest". This is the core problem about stretching inequality, because individualism makes people work for their own selves, and NEVER encourage anyone to "take one for the team". The whole story is about how people perceives their own selves. This is an important debate. I'm sure those 9.9% would be very surprised they belong to the top 10%. The graph of income is always growing exponentially, yet for some reason people are throwing away the idea that they might be the ones to blame, because people will naturally find argument that they're not to blame. It's always the responsibility of someone else. I personally have not lived the wealthiest life there is in term of income, but you know, at least I don't complain, because when I compare it to the rest of the world, being in the lower 50% or 60% or 30% in a modern and developed country is still a pretty good life.
  - refurb 8y ago
    Yup! Asking someone "How much money makes a person rich?" is like asking someone "How many drinks makes you an alcoholic?". The answer is typically "Someone who drinks more than I do."
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Actually, there is a qualitative difference in play. It is reached at millions USD in (relatively) liquid assets or highly concentrated political power. It is the potential to do almost anything w here only another big player or a whole society can blunt it and not necessarily effectively. It is the difference between playing the rules and making the rules.
    - k__ 8y ago
      If you can live entirely from investments you're rich.
- hyperpape 8y ago
  > I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant. I doubt this particular point. The 98th percentile of earners make something like $200-$300k a year, the 89th percentile make about $100k/year[0]. That's a big difference, and it will equate to an even bigger difference in wealth, but not enough that the 98th percentile will substantially outweigh the combined 89th-97th percentiles. (Arguing otherwise means assuming that the one group has 8 times as much wealth per capita as the other). It's also true that the 98th percentile includes plenty of people in the HN crowd. That's the point: well paid professional types (or software engineers) are not being hurt by the gains that accrue to the very top of the income distribution. So far as they/we cluster in the same industries/subsectors that are growing those billionaires, we have--to some extent--shared interests. For instance, Amazon software engineers might gain by clawing back money from Bezos and the stockholders, but they don't have a monetary interest in redirecting pay to the warehouse workers. [0] immediate googled source: https://investormint.com/investing/how-much-does-the-top-1-make https://investormint.com/investing/how-much-does-the-top-1-m... I always thought the 99th percentile started a bit higher, but this is roughly in line with what I've read before.
  - throwaway080383 8y ago
    Note that the article and comments are talking about wealth, not income. I know a few young software engineers who are likely in the 98th percentile for income but not even the 90th for wealth. According to https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/ https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta..., the ratio between the 98th and 89th percentile of wealth actually is roughly 5-6x. (89th is around 1.1 million, 98th around 5.8 million).
    - hyperpape 8y ago
      Thanks for the source. I noted that the wealth gap would be larger, but it's still not enough to make the parent poster's comment accurate (filling in a few points, you have 93rd percentile ~ $2 million, 96th ~ $3 million, 97th ~ $4 million). Of course, income doesn't map that directly to wealth, even after accounting for age (if your income derives from a salary/investments from savings, you expect to move up further in wealth than in income as you age). Those 98th percentile income software engineers won't be 98th percentile in wealth when they're 60 unless they save extreme amounts of money, but they'll enter that 9.9% if they're prudent.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Needing 1.2 million to enter the top 10% gives some indication of the wealth these people have though.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    I'm intrigued by thinking about wealth vs income. To get to the 1% in income takes $250k a year, apparently 195k gets you to the top 2%. So in Seattle, that means that almost every software engineer at a big company (amazon, facebook, microsoft, google, etc) with 10 or 15 years of experience is probably in the 1%. Thousands and thousands of people. If I was a dental hygienist like my mom, or a teacher, I'd be middle class but not 1%. We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are, those of us software engineers. I am hoping against my expectation that somehow there will be good jobs in the future for more than the 1% (bio-medical engineering maybe?).
    - doktrin 8y ago
      > We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are This only applies to a small fraction of engineers clustered in a literal handful of geographic areas. I personally don't know a single engineer in my country that makes $200k (and the cost of living here is just as high as any major US city). Earning half that is seen as a very good salary.
      - Latteland 8y ago
        Well, I did say Seattle. Yes, I'm fortunate. I did move here for a good job 20 years ago. I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.
        doktrin 8y ago
        > I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market. Logically it should at least not hurt the rest of the market, but anecdotally : during my time in the midwest, salaries were stagnant / sticky around $80k so I would caution against overestimating the trickle down effect of coastal income.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. It's a arbitrary, but it's also useful to have a cutoff point. And due to power laws, as you observed, falling below that is already too low.
- Nomentatus 8y ago
  Do you find topographical maps arbitrary and misleading too? 'Cause it's the same method. What alternative methodology for describing the wealth peak do you prefer? With luck, maybe we'll be able to take it and improve our maps, too.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    A standard density function would do fine, and not have a wholly artificial dependence on bucket width. What's a topological map?
    - Nomentatus 8y ago
      Got it - you won't draw any line; that way nobody in particular is responsible or has to do anything. This sort of maneuver is surely just what the author means when he says a central tactic of the 9.9% is: "the pretense of being part of the middle as one of our strategies for remaining on top." The OP argument in a nutshell: "In the United States, it’s the children of the bottom decile and, above all, the top decile—the 9.9 percent—who settle down nearest to their starting point." So how would using just a function, so as not to embarrass any one class, fix that?
  - anbende 8y ago
    I think this is a little different. It's not the whole methodology that's the problem. It's the non-standard bin-sizes. If he wants to do log or exponential sizes, then it's 90.1, 9, .9 or you could round it off to 90, 9, and 1. By making it 90, 9.9 and .1, then he's artificially inflated the middle bin size while simultaneously exclaiming that this bin has more wealth in it than expected. It's like having a y-axis on a graph that reads: 10 100 5000 10000 (with equally spaced points) and then talking about how there's more action between 100 and 5000 than there is between 5000 and 10000.
    - Nomentatus 8y ago
      9.9 is the top ten percent minus the .1 percent - he agrees the .1% are a problem, but wants to address his own class, the rest of the top 10% = 9.9%. That bin has the size it has, and the measured effects he points to presumably deduct the stats for the .1%. There's no trickery, just a stat or two to conjure with. If you think he's skewed the measure by using mean instead of median or mode and not subtracting the contributions of the .1% that's an interesting argument but you have to make it - show evidence of that, plus make the calculation to demonstrate that the effect is large. If that's the argument I might suggest dropping "bin size" and employing the term "skew."
- apatters 8y ago
  The premise of the article is so ridiculous that I wonder if it's a false flag. "The 9.9," by and large, are not the ones who have subverted the basic American principles of democratic governance, free markets, and equal opportunity via regulatory capture. They aren't rich enough. The 1% is. I wonder who paid Matthew Stewart, an Oxford-educated management consultant for "large financial institutions,"[1] to write such an article. [1] http://mwstewart.com/about/ http://mwstewart.com/about/
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  > holds 40% of US wealth The government holds most of the wealth.
- tejtm 8y ago
  Although I agree it is a continuum, And I would like to think I am not contributing to the problem, I will point out that we in general are not the ones to choose where the cutoff is and historically, revolutionary retribution strikes deeper than the top 1%.
eternalban 8y ago
I couldn't help but think of Eyes Wide Shut when reading this. For those who have seen the film, the leading character, a physician who lives in Upper East Side in Manhattan, easily fits the bill (npi) of being a 9.9%er. But as Kubrick makes it clear, he is merely a well paid servant of the true hidden aristocracy, and very much preoccupied with matters that are of no concern to the aristocratic class. I agree with the other commentators' critique of OP here. The 9.9%ers are the new Social 'Thin Blue Line' [1]. Here's the recruitment advert in case you are interested :) https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line
- kolbe 8y ago
  That was just a fictional movie, man. I wouldn't read too much into that.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Bit like Chekhov?
matthewaveryusa 8y ago
The top 10% is 120k in income or 1.2m in net worth -- would be nice to see the demographics. In any case, 1.2m in net worth is a house with some retirement money, not exactly what I would call aristocracy.
- mrybczyn 8y ago
  And yet it's more than 90.1% of the population posesses... Interestingly, some estimates of (formal) Polish aristocracy in the 17th century place it around 10% of the population. Maybe this is just some natural distribution of socio-econo-political status of human groups.
  - gaius 8y ago
    And yet it's more than 90.1% of the population posesses... These analyses tend to overlook the age dimension. It is entirely normal that a 65-year-old about to retire would have accumulated more assets than a 22-year-old who has just graduated with student debts. So is the proportion of the population holding the wealth also the proportion of the population who has been working and saving for 30-40 years already? If so there is nothing to see here, move along...
    - e12e 8y ago
      > So is the proportion of the population holding the wealth also the proportion of the population who has been working and saving for 30-40 years already? I doubt it: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/population/US_popgraph%202016.bmp https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
  - tscs37 8y ago
    As another comment here pointed out; 90.1% possess about 30% of the wealth. 9% possess another 30% of the wealth. The remaining 0.9% possess the rest. Is the 9% to blame for inequality?
    - 8y ago
p49k 8y ago
Rebuttal from Slate: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-percent-the-1-percent-are-still-the-problem.html?via=gdpr-consent https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-...
- sologoub 8y ago
  Key paragraph: “He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees. According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution. Stewart’s “9.9 percent” includes a lot of working professionals and business owners with gilded academic résumés, sure. But it also probably encompasses a lot of 75-year-old former accountants and nurses and guys with construction businesses who made a comfortable living decades ago, bought a house, and paid down the mortgage while saving for retirement. There’s no real way to tell a consistent story about who these people are, which makes it a bit hard to blame them for the death of opportunity in this country.”
  - refurb 8y ago
    This is a great rebuttal. We seem to ignore that wealth changes over a person's life. When average wages are dropping, are they actually dropping or are wealthy people leaving the workforce at a greater rate than lower income people (just starting their careers) entering it? Kind of what we'd expect when the baby boomers retire, no?
    - DrPhish 8y ago
      Census Canada has an income explorer that includes wealth percentiles by age (and sex, by province etc) http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dv-vd/inc-rev/index-eng.cfm http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dv-... It's quite a stark difference in the percentiles from 20 to 40 to 60. Slate is absolutely right that without further controls for things like age, these percentiles are misleading
mistrial9 8y ago
This headline feeds into knee-jerk tendency to assign a simple social class category to some combination of money, prestige, agency (ability to drive change) and status; from the ground-view, reality is nothing like that now. There is no simple formula for any of those things, being very well decoupled.
dgreensp 8y ago
Wait, so 10% of the county is millionaires (more or less, if 9.9% are 1.2-millionaires), and these people have such “good family, good health, and good jobs” that they might as well be a different species? If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? I think the author’s intent was to acknowledge privilege, but the article is just making more weird caricatures. I think it’s better to put a spotlight on particular ways people might not be able to advance themselves as much as the usual narrative would suggest.
- hobls 8y ago
  edit: Whoops. My recollection of the article was quite wrong! ---- No, the article states that the average wealth of the 9.9% is 1.2m. This is of course heavily influenced by people at in the top 1%; people in the 10th percentile are not all millionaires.
  - dgreensp 8y ago
    “As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 percent; $2.4 million to reach the group’s median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 percent.”
- LateRuin 8y ago
  >If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents / divorced / never married
  - analog31 8y ago
    I wouldn't have thought this until I had kids, who "forced" me to greatly expand my social milieu beyond my fellow geeks and musicians. Our kids got involved in some activities (e.g., violin lessons) that are almost exclusively the domain of the upper middle class. I remember attending a large group recital with maybe 100 kids, and virtually none of them were obese.
mozumder 8y ago
Class differentiation is the central meaning of life. The struggle is the point. You get up and wear nice clothes in the morning so that you're better than the slob that doesn't. Nobody wants to be the same as everyone else. If everyone was equal, then there would be no point in your existence. You become a bag of mostly water. Celebrate the fact that a few billionaires and royalty and celebrities exists. Life is more interesting and surprising that way. Can you imagine how terrible and pointless everything would be if everyone was middle class? We should focus on the very bottom, not the very top.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Can you imagine how terrible everything would be if everyone was middle class? It would be a vast improvement over the status quo, where most people are either working class or underclass. > We should focus on the very bottom, not the very top. They aren't separate issues, they are aspects of the same issue.
- wybiral 8y ago
  It's possible for us to focus both on improving conditions at the very bottom and also trying to understand how a very small percentage at the very top is siphoning so much out of our shared system. I would argue that both issues are worth looking at.
  - ainiriand 8y ago
    We have people very rich, more than ever before. And that is just by itself something worth of careful examination. But a lot of that wealth is new. There are effective mechanisms to not being poor. More people can access to self-improvement tools than ever before. So yes, we should focus on the lower end of the scale.
    - wybiral 8y ago
      > a lot of that wealth is new Where is the "new" wealth coming from? > There are effective mechanisms to not being poor. That seems like a generalization to me that doesn't factor in location, race, access to good education, medical conditions, existing debt, etc. > So yes, we should focus on the lower end of the scale. Why not both?
leetcrew 8y ago
> Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. this statement is literally true, but aside from "in relative terms", the wording of the whole sentence seems to evoke a zero sum game. I see this type of writing in most articles about inequality and I wish the authors would strive to be more explicit. it's an important distinction, even if we agree that relative gains are just significant as absolute gains.
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  The explicit invocation of the concept "zero-sum" is avoided because it's a lightning rod for criticism, where someone will inevitably chime in to point out the realization of absolute gains of utility among the losers also; specifically, that important metrics like living standards have been improving for wide swaths of the population, even those whose share of wealth declined over time. And therein lies the disconnect: both can be true, because one of them is a tautology; and it just so happens that relative disparities in wealth among the pool of people in market for a service will cause the competition to attain some elements of an auction, and cause the poorer parties to lose out.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    to be clear, I am not criticizing the author for not explicitly using the term "zero-sum game"; however dysfunctional the economy may be, it is clearly not that. I am criticizing the author for writing about relative gains using language (e.g. "pie", "taking from", "giving up") that is clearly evocative of a zero sum game. it encourages the uncareful reader to conflate absolute and relative gains.
- tachyonbeam 8y ago
  Except it isn't really true. Much of the economic recovery post 2008 was fueled by the FED buying assets. They've been buying stocks and bonds to keep the prices rising. So the FED has been directly handing money to people who own stocks and bonds. We can argue as to whether this is better, worse or functionally equivalent to directly taking money from the middle class, but it isn't exactly the same thing. I personally wish that instead of printing money to buy stocks and bonds, they had enacted something like UBI instead. Give the money you're printing to people who need it. I think it's actually better for a capitalist economy, because then corporations still need to compete to get that money from consumers, instead of just being bailed out, which rewards failing corporations.
seibelj 8y ago
I believe very strongly in equality of opportunity, and the liberal tendency to zone everything to prevent development and keep out the poors is a glaring example of hipocrisy. I don’t know if charter schools are the answer, but certainly letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power.
- distances 8y ago
  > letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power. Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?
  - temp-dude-87844 8y ago
    A K-12 student's performance correlates strongly with the family's wealth [1], and interacts with several other factors like race category, stable home life, and the low incidence of everyday violent crime. If rich people successfully exclude poor people, which can be done with legal price mechanisms instead of illegal discrimination, public school performance remains high. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Even without price there are other mechanisms - accumulation of rich in specific places by word of mouth alone... where the influence and money is accumulated and applied. We see this even in primary education even in Europe, even in non-private schools. Then there are extracurriculars which take money amd time... A typical person out of place won't be able to keep up.
      - 8y ago
ryandrake 8y ago
In the past, nobody really attacked the rich because so many Americans think they'll one day be in their shoes. In 2003, we learned that 19% of Americans think they are in the richest 1% and a further 20% expect to be someday [1]. People have slowly woken up to the fact that their math was way off and class mobility doesn't really work that way. The brief "Occupy" movement and the identification of the 1% as a species largely unlike the rest of us shined a big spotlight on a class of people who would rather not receive so much attention. This article seems to be almost deliberately engineered to downplay the 1%-vs-99% narrative that once illustrated a distinct oil-vs-water class divide in the country. How better to confuse people about who the villains are than to muddy the water by adding "slightly richer normal people" into the mix with the plutocrats and Wall Street billionaires. This almost reads as a PR piece, straight from the desk of the Koch brothers or a Wall Street managing director: "Look over there! There's a hard working father of two who owns a few laundromats and a family doctor with a vacation home! Those guys are totally relatable to you poor people, just like us billionaires!" 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hope-over-self-interest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-ho...
- CM30 8y ago
  > How better to confuse people about who the villains are than to muddy the water by adding "slightly richer normal people" into the mix with the plutocrats and Wall Street billionaires. Eh, I feel that was done more by the increased focus on social issues and race/gender/whatever tensions to be honest. Isn't it super convenient that all these identity politics wars came about JUST after Occupy and the possibility the rich were going to be in the firing line? Or that class usually isn't mentioned there?
FrozenVoid 8y ago
A clever manipulation piece: It melds 1% multi-millionaires with upper-middle class to create some kind of bourgeois enemy. In reality these 32 million people have different lifestyles, sources of income and their networth does not indicate true wealth: they could be living in an expensive house that they bought much cheaper, but a few trips into a hospital will bankrupt them. The whole concept of "net worth" is highly deceptive and can be manipulated into framing economic importance as function of potential wealth(if "X sold all their property" vs actual currency reserves).
- CamTin 8y ago
  Not accounting for people's home equity when determining their wealth is one of the most bonkers bougie things I've ever heard. Should we not count their 401k savings either, because "if X took the early withdrawal penalty" isn't fair either? If you're rich, you're rich. It makes no difference if that wealth is tied up in illiquid assets. If the precarity if your financial situation is based on the fact that you're worth millions but have decided for some reason to leave it invested in one large, volatile asset, then you don't get to claim you're in the same boat as someone who is pawning their wedding ring until payday to make rent. Being rich but poorly invested (90% of your net worth is in your home equity) is a decision you made, not a situation you found yourself born into.
  - matthewdgreen 8y ago
    If every single person in the country made exactly the same salary, and saved the same percentage of their income to cover the exact same modest retirement lifestyle, you'd still have people (close to retirement) who appeared "rich" and people early in their career who appeared relatively "poor". Using wealth data without normalizing for age you could also make it look like there was a vastly unequal society, and of course there would no policy you could adopt to "fix" the problem that wasn't there. What the author is doing here is literally the definition of bad data science.
  - FrozenVoid 8y ago
    >If you're rich, you're rich. I'm not even middle class, i don't own a house or a car. I just see that people easily overgeneralize the well-off 30 million upper-middle class with truly rich people who have entirely different lifestyle. Believing the there is 32million strong aristocracy is delusional, all these SJW privilege Olympics make your kind seem insane and full of envy. You want to lump middle-class people with multi-millionaires with financial security and proclaim them the unified burgeios enemy that must be dealt with. "If they have some money, They're rich capitalist pigs" Its like some soviet union guilt trip: If you own jeans your dangerous bourgie class traitor! If you listen to foreign radio = capitalist lapdog. If you own foreign currency = speculator and capitalist. Soviet Union glamorized poverty and struggle, everyone was LARPing as some poor, honest worker despite a black market,blat and bribery being commonplace. If you dislike Bourgeois(aka Middle class) so much, why don't take one-way ticket flight to socialist paradise of Venezuela? They're getting rid of their toxic privileged Bourgeois class. Just for the record i'm NOT some "free-market will fix it" capitalist: I'm in favor of sane, Scandinavian-like system of democracy(also promoted by Bernie Sanders as democratic socialism) which exist with support of high taxes. I'm against gulags, wealth redistribution and marking people as class traitors/privileged/"eat the Rich", to which any communist country eventually devolves.
Areading314 8y ago
"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below" The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been "transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this: https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...
- tedeh 8y ago
  They key term is of course "at a slower rate" which implies more and more of the total wealth of society is accumulated at the top.
- dahauns 8y ago
  "The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate." For the last two decades, your source actually says the opposite. The lowest three quintiles peaked in the dot-com bubble, with the bottom quintile losing the most (almost 10%) and only the middle quintile just recently reaching those levels again.
  - Areading314 8y ago
    Agreed, I meant over time as in over the last century. Interesting that the 90s was this much of a peak though!
- imbokodo 8y ago
  As all wealth that can be created comes from work, and as the heirs who mostly make up the 0.1% do not work, it follows that the wealth comes from those below. Actually the article has a fairly conservative vantage. As the pie is not what is significant. The wealth and money and pie have little significance. What matters is the expropriation of surplus labor time, by the heir, from the one who works. It is a social relationship, expropriating the worker's time. The pie, the wealth, the product is not what has significance here.
acjohnson55 8y ago
I see this piece less as an identification of the 9.9% as being "the problem" so much as it is a call to get people who are doing well to acknowledge that we exist in a vortex of generational success that is rather exclusive of most of the country.
spaceman1331 8y ago
> you're probably part of the problem > YOU'RE PROBABLY PART OF THE PROBLEM > YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM > YOU'RE THE PROBLEM Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go send your sons to exile To serve your captives' need -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
spicymaki 8y ago
The reporting on this seems rather empty. Yes economic inequality is growing, yes the new rich are delusional about it, and yes that will lead to economic and social catastrophe. Elites like being elite because it excludes everyone else. That’s the point of it. How do you convince those in power to not consolidate it and pass it on to their offspring?
- danharaj 8y ago
  Insurrection, if it comes to that?
fpig 8y ago
If you pick 4.73% or 17.23% as the cutoff point you will reach the same conclusions, the numbers behave as you would expect. I read a similar article once that focused on the top 20% by income, this one focuses on top 10% by wealth... The reality is that there is no "aristocratic cutoff point" - people get richer (and their incomes go up) faster smoothly as you go towards the right on the curve. I don't understand why the author feels his "top 10%" cutoff is somehow especially insightful and "smarter" than the 1% one. It is entirely arbitrary. He says: “We are the 99 percent” sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis. But if you do an analysis of the 1%, the advantages you ascribe to the 9.9% will hold much more strongly. If you do it for the top 20% they will also hold, but less strongly. You just picked a number and ran with it. There is nothing insightful there. Income inequality has been growing but what the author is attempting to do is childish, although the article is surprisingly well-written considering how stupid the core idea is.
- mark212 8y ago
  because it gives him a nice chart: the top 0.1% have been taking the gains away from the bottom 90% -- while that 9.9% in between has been holding steady. And I agree, it's a stupid core idea.
- tlb 8y ago
  Most readers aren't in the 1%, but most (Atlantic Monthly) readers are in the 10%. Articles about the 1% are about "them"; articles about the 10% are about "us". That's a reasonable premise for an article: move the goalpost and show what it's like to be on the other side of it.
- adventured 8y ago
  It's meant to expand the class warfare numbers, that's the sole purpose of moving the goalpost from the 1% to the 10%. You could just as easily set the line at the top 1/3, because that group in the US is better off than any top 1/3 in any other nation. The US controls ~35% of all wealth on earth, with 4% of the population; that wealth is almost all stacked among the top ~85 million adults - a bit more than 1% of the world's population. Among those 85 million adults, there are over 11 million millionaires [1]. Nothing like that mass affluence exists anywhere else. So if you really wanted to push the class warfare game to its inevitable conclusion, you'd pit the majority bottom 2/3 against the minority top 1/3. If you were a nefarious type, this also works particularly well because it pits whites & asians against blacks & hispanics, as those groups largely divide by those income/wealth lines. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans-are-now-millionaires-new-study-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans...
mirko22 8y ago
Which form of society would allow for complete equality? Where everyone has the same things to eat, drink and learn and everyone is missing the same things (usually luxury). I can’t think of any social system like that mostly cos it all involves people and not all people are the same and will behave differently inevitably wanting different stuff which will lead to more more inequality over time. Maybe someone has ideas?
- prolikewhoa 8y ago
  Socialism, Communism? The workers owning the means of production and abolition of private property? Cuba is doing fairly fine despite decades of American propaganda & the embargo. It has its problems, but so does USA or any country for that matter.
  - mirko22 8y ago
    Not necessarily existing system. Any system where people are truly equal. Even in communism you will have leaders, and leaders will enjoy some form of higher privilege. So collective ownership of the, in lack of the better word, stuff would still not abolish social privileges, which people renowned in some manner would have. Likewise, different responsibility instiled in people by any means, will undoubtedly lead to different performance in the work place, which will, in some way or other, separate them from general social or material status. So, it seems to me, best we could do is some form of society wich has low band of frequency in which people can move in any type of self emerging hierarchy so everyone enjoys nearly the same status. But how do you deal with over achievers then? There would inevitably be people who, with their performance, go out of that band. You might start by separating achievers that contribute or take from society which would then lead to having some form of arbitars which would in turn again enyjoy some type of higher status. And so on... the only truly equal society is the one where everyone share the same thoughts and goals and do the same things, as any deviation into something new could spell special privileges for that individual. And i do this only as a thought experiment, cos I am stuck in the loop of if not all people think and do the same thing how can we expect them to be same... So maybe someone has ideas about this. Maybe I am just crazy.
- 8y ago
zneveu 8y ago
I really enjoyed reading this piece. The author poses several rhetorical questions that I think could use evidence to support their assumed conclusions, but overall this piece seems very well informed and sheds light on a class of people that I am very familiar with but had never divided out in my head.
reggieband 8y ago
This was a very long article so it doesn't surprise me that most people are commenting on the 9.9% figure while missing the authors point. I've seen a similar point made several times recently and it goes something like this: The "true elites" have constructed a social and economic system that syphons off the majority of wealth. The "wannabe elites" at the top of the remaining pile are actually complicit servants of the elite (who cares if it is 9%, 11% or whatever). These wannabes enjoy their privileges but realize their position is precarious. Their anxiety at losing this position makes them more eager servants to the elites and they become highly protective of their own positions. Maintaining wannabe elite status is more important than effecting societal change and it consumes all of their available resources and time. The people at the bottom of the system are always upset and spend most of their time fighting amongst themselves and scheming on how to get into the privileged wannabe group. They spend all of their resources and time just trying to survive. There is a constant threat that if this rabble becomes angry enough then they will violently revolt. The elites like to remind the wannabes that when the pitchforks come out then it will be for the wannabes, those soft/weak knowledge workers who are unable to fly to their second home in Europe. So, it is really in the wannabes best interest to quell the dissent. In this narrative, the alliance between the insanely rich and the dirt poor makes sense. The real elites let the educated wannabes know they have their finger on the button. They do so in subtle think pieces in the kind of magazines the rabble won't read. Don't forget, your comfortable lifestyle is predicated on serving the elites. If individually you rebel then you will lose your privileges. If en-masse you rebel then there will be a violent revolt directed at you. Good luck finding a way out of all of this is what the author leaves us with. The wannabes are the dupes in a con-game. We think we are in on the con and yet we also realize that if things go bad then we'll be the ones left holding the bag. We're being taught to accept an inherit complicity as a means to convince us to keep going along with it. You already knew everything there was to know before you read this article.
- roywiggins 8y ago
  This tripartite split (elite, bourgeois, poor) is a very old one. I am sure I read a paper in an undergrad poly-sci course that analyzed the fate of nations based on which two teamed up against the third. Elites+poor is a pretty dangerous combination because they end up catching civil society in the pincers.
arduanika 8y ago
Reading this article makes me think of the word choice that new button on Facebook that lets you report that a link is a "false" news story. Notice the subtle shift away from the populist phrase — the accusation is not that the news is "false", but rather "fake". The facts in this piece are by and large true (although if you look closely you can see a few opinions and judgement calls that have calcified into facts). However, Stewart's class confessional is the essence of "fake news", in that it assumes a viewpoint, speaks authoritatively and factually from it, and ignores the gaping details that would contradict his story. The assumed viewpoint gets slipped into the middle of a sentence like this: "Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below". Read: increases in absolute wealth do not matter; it's all about the Joneses. Just as when postmodernists academics obsess over power hierarchies, you can see the hunger for power at the core of their doctrine, so it is here: when pop-socio-economists talk to no end about inequality, you can see that they are driven not by a desire to improve conditions, but by envy and by (as Stewart projects onto the Trump base) resentment. Where is the discussion of poverty here? Stewart cares not a whit about poverty. Ctrl-F for it: the single instance of is in the phrase “relative poverty”. Thus we get a sentence such as “We are the staff that runs the machine that funnels resources from the 90 percent to the 0.1 percent”, which is dynamite verbiage if you clicked on this article in order to wallow in your upper middle class guilt. But read closer: the wealth of the 90% has, in point of fact, not gone down, merely stagnated. They have not been funneled from, except in these relative, zero-sum terms. As far as the “gaping details”, any discussion of inequality that is so myopically focused on one country in the global system is missing the big picture. Here’s what’s been going on with actual, absolute wealth since the 70’s: huge swaths of the developing world have been raised out of poverty. A few lucky, skilled, well-positioned, and/or hardworking elites, both in the US and abroad, have gotten fabulously rich off the new global economy. And yes, incomes for the bottom 90% in the US and Western Europe, far from keeping pace with this global growth, have risen hardly at all. (How does this story of massive poverty relief play out for the secondary concern of inequality? Exactly as advertised in every true-but-fake screed, wealth inequality has skyrocketed within the United States, and within China, and within [insert your country here, probably]. What is scrupulously avoided by Stewart and others is that, as the gap between countries narrows, the overall contour and slope of the global wealth distribution has remained roughly constant). If you do care to grapple with the messy data, you could pick worse starting places than here: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality (although you can see in the title that Roser and Ortiz-Ospina are already starting from two wrong premises: that “inequality”, not poverty, is the topic at hand, and that “income”, not wealth, is the natural locus of that inequality). However, Stewart mentions none of this. If we assume good faith, we can chock the omission up to Stewart’s ignorance and his meager qualification to preach on this topic. If we assume bad faith, then his careful aggregation of confirmatory true facts and dismissal of the big picture data is straight up mendacious, or as the tweeter of the best words puts it, fake. Note that this characterization is not personally specific to Stewart. It applies also to the fake rebuttal from Slate in the link above. Both magazines assume the premise that inequality is the problem, not poverty, and then they bicker about the cutoff point. Of course the 1% gatekeeps against the 99%! You could write just as incisive (and factually correct) an analysis of the 0.1% gatekeeping against the 99.9%, or of the 5% against the 95%, and on down the line. But to say that gatekeeping is the whole story is to succumb to the zero-sum fallacy. To say that violins exist merely to get my kid into Harvard ahead of yours is reductionistic, impoverished thinking that may help you sleep but will not, in the long run, win you any elections. The wealth story is global. Progress is real. The pie has gotten bigger. Poverty, not inequality, is the issue to tackle. Teapot Dome and Enron are the exception, not the rule. Facts are messy. Class is a continuum. And to suggest otherwise is fake news.
kayeetong 8y ago
Those doctors, dentists and lawyers he mentions are drowning in loans - https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-student-loans-how-did-that-happen-1527252975 https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-stud...
throw2016 8y ago
The embrace of neoliberalism in the 80s decimated the traditional middle class. Wages stagnated and labor share of income has taken a hit [1] while capital ascended. Debt has become the biggest product leading to wide scale financialization and rent seeking. Lobbying and revolving doors has further added to entrenched interests benefiting at the cost of the whole. This is at the heart of how you define a country, a collection of economic interests arbitrated by the market as an end in itself, or a 'society' with larger goals. The neoliberalism agenda has convinced many of the first. [1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/capitals-share-income-way-higher-think.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/capitals-share-incom...
solidsnack9000 8y ago
It is entirely possible to get a good education at the many schools that don’t count as “good” in our brand-obsessed system. But the “bad” ones really are bad for you. For those who made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, our society offers a kind of virtual education system. It has places that look like colleges—but aren’t really. It has debt—and that, unfortunately, is real. The people who enter into this class hologram do not collect a college premium; they wind up in something more like indentured servitude. A surreal and sad vision.
- LoonyBalloony 8y ago
  What better way to teach kids how the real world works then scamming them?
solidsnack9000 8y ago
Many commenters have highlighted faults in this article. Maybe the 9.9% aren't to blame; maybe they aren't a meaningful classification to begin with; maybe there is more to the story than people hauling the ladder up after themselves. Yet these criticisms miss the author's warning: regardless of the causes, when substantial inequality obtains, opting into the social contract looks like a good idea for a smaller and smaller subset of people. That's when civil society falls apart. To not beggar thy neighbor is not only generosity, fairness, respect for human dignity -- it is also prudence.

248 points by noonespecial 8y ago

Dupe: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Birth%20of%20the%20New%20American%20Aristocracy&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Birth%20of%20the%20New%2...

Fnoord 8y ago
Apparently if it didn't create meaningful discussion it isn't a dupe.

anbende 8y ago

Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top. The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The distribution is highly skewed, and the much of the wealth in the 9.9 is going to actually be in that top .9. In other words, the author just divides the top 1% into two pieces, and lumps one of them in with “the 9.9”. Edit: I did a little research and math. The top 1% holds 40% of US wealth. The top 10% holds 77%. That’s 37% to “the 9%”. I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.

danharaj 8y ago
Right, it obfuscates class distinctions between those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money. I'm somewhat cynical but I think this is an intended obfuscation. It's important for petit bourgeois and wealthy skilled workers to understand their position in the class hierarchy, but calling a class whose power is dwarfed by the capitalist class an aristocracy is fluffy rhetoric.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nordsieck 8y ago
  > those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money Controlling policy is one thing. Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? Anyone who has money actually has some sort of capital or an equivalently powerful financial instrument be it stocks, loans to other companies, government bonds, a house, etc.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    Just because you own, e.g. stock doesn't mean you control the underlying means of production it represents a share of. Most people who own stock do so as part of a retirement fund. Those institutional investors, banks, managers, politicians, corporate board members, CEO's, etc. Are the ones who actually control capital. It should be emphasized that a lot of how capitalism runs these days is in the hands of huge bureaucracies that comprise people but don't quite act like people. There is a small class of people who operate at that level as individuals: these are the capitalist class. This is an important distinction, don't you think?
    - djajshgsjja 8y ago
      All those people you listed are still cogs in the machine, to varying degrees. The CEOs are beholden to the boards, who are beholden to the institutional investors, who manage my 401k. Certainly, the CEOs have higher leverage over the system on an individual basis. But anyone whose wealth is increasing mainly through return on capital is a member, if not a leader, of the capitalist class.
      - danharaj 8y ago
        Sure, they're all beholden to each other but they're the ones who make the decisions about how to allocate the means of production and which labor power to buy. People who derive their income primarily from investments but don't really decide anything or buy labor power are a rung below those who do. Taxonomize it however you want provided the distinction remains.
auggierose 8y ago
If you can't afford a superyacht, you are probably not Aristocracy.
zaroth 8y ago
Not surprisingly, every time you zoom into an exponential distribution you will find... an exponential distribution.
dv_dt 8y ago
Divide and conquer. I think someone finds it convenient to break up the 99% narrative. It's very similar to the excoriation of public employees unions who negotiate solid living wages for their members - it makes too much of a contrast for many who are on basically a subsidence living in the private industry
beager 8y ago
I think the point TFA was making is that the 9.9% hasn’t experienced a decline in wealth in order to feed the accretion of wealth in the top 0.1%, and that such a situation creates an aristocratic attitude among that 9.9%, dulling any motivation to fix wealth inequality or economic immobility in the bottom 90%. I believe that the term 9.9% is a slogan though.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  The difference between comfort and struggle, hmm? Three real question is what the 9.8% can do even if completely united to fix the problem that the top 0.1% cannot stop. Unless you mean politicians (who are typically in top) - because power and wealth are related but nor equivalent - and transferable plus exchangeable.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jokoon 8y ago
I disagree. What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income. Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless. You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still against inequality, but I am comfortable, but since I AM NOT AT THE TOP, YOU CANNOT BLAME ME, so blame the richest". This is the core problem about stretching inequality, because individualism makes people work for their own selves, and NEVER encourage anyone to "take one for the team". The whole story is about how people perceives their own selves. This is an important debate. I'm sure those 9.9% would be very surprised they belong to the top 10%. The graph of income is always growing exponentially, yet for some reason people are throwing away the idea that they might be the ones to blame, because people will naturally find argument that they're not to blame. It's always the responsibility of someone else. I personally have not lived the wealthiest life there is in term of income, but you know, at least I don't complain, because when I compare it to the rest of the world, being in the lower 50% or 60% or 30% in a modern and developed country is still a pretty good life.
- refurb 8y ago
  Yup! Asking someone "How much money makes a person rich?" is like asking someone "How many drinks makes you an alcoholic?". The answer is typically "Someone who drinks more than I do."
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Actually, there is a qualitative difference in play. It is reached at millions USD in (relatively) liquid assets or highly concentrated political power. It is the potential to do almost anything w here only another big player or a whole society can blunt it and not necessarily effectively. It is the difference between playing the rules and making the rules.
  - k__ 8y ago
    If you can live entirely from investments you're rich.
hyperpape 8y ago
> I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant. I doubt this particular point. The 98th percentile of earners make something like $200-$300k a year, the 89th percentile make about $100k/year[0]. That's a big difference, and it will equate to an even bigger difference in wealth, but not enough that the 98th percentile will substantially outweigh the combined 89th-97th percentiles. (Arguing otherwise means assuming that the one group has 8 times as much wealth per capita as the other). It's also true that the 98th percentile includes plenty of people in the HN crowd. That's the point: well paid professional types (or software engineers) are not being hurt by the gains that accrue to the very top of the income distribution. So far as they/we cluster in the same industries/subsectors that are growing those billionaires, we have--to some extent--shared interests. For instance, Amazon software engineers might gain by clawing back money from Bezos and the stockholders, but they don't have a monetary interest in redirecting pay to the warehouse workers. [0] immediate googled source: https://investormint.com/investing/how-much-does-the-top-1-make https://investormint.com/investing/how-much-does-the-top-1-m... I always thought the 99th percentile started a bit higher, but this is roughly in line with what I've read before.
- throwaway080383 8y ago
  Note that the article and comments are talking about wealth, not income. I know a few young software engineers who are likely in the 98th percentile for income but not even the 90th for wealth. According to https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-states/ https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta..., the ratio between the 98th and 89th percentile of wealth actually is roughly 5-6x. (89th is around 1.1 million, 98th around 5.8 million).
  - hyperpape 8y ago
    Thanks for the source. I noted that the wealth gap would be larger, but it's still not enough to make the parent poster's comment accurate (filling in a few points, you have 93rd percentile ~ $2 million, 96th ~ $3 million, 97th ~ $4 million). Of course, income doesn't map that directly to wealth, even after accounting for age (if your income derives from a salary/investments from savings, you expect to move up further in wealth than in income as you age). Those 98th percentile income software engineers won't be 98th percentile in wealth when they're 60 unless they save extreme amounts of money, but they'll enter that 9.9% if they're prudent.
Aeolun 8y ago
Needing 1.2 million to enter the top 10% gives some indication of the wealth these people have though.
- Latteland 8y ago
  I'm intrigued by thinking about wealth vs income. To get to the 1% in income takes $250k a year, apparently 195k gets you to the top 2%. So in Seattle, that means that almost every software engineer at a big company (amazon, facebook, microsoft, google, etc) with 10 or 15 years of experience is probably in the 1%. Thousands and thousands of people. If I was a dental hygienist like my mom, or a teacher, I'd be middle class but not 1%. We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are, those of us software engineers. I am hoping against my expectation that somehow there will be good jobs in the future for more than the 1% (bio-medical engineering maybe?).
  - doktrin 8y ago
    > We should constantly appreciate how fortunate we are are This only applies to a small fraction of engineers clustered in a literal handful of geographic areas. I personally don't know a single engineer in my country that makes $200k (and the cost of living here is just as high as any major US city). Earning half that is seen as a very good salary.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      Well, I did say Seattle. Yes, I'm fortunate. I did move here for a good job 20 years ago. I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market.
      - doktrin 8y ago
        > I would expect that west coast salary increases should also pull up the entire market. Logically it should at least not hurt the rest of the market, but anecdotally : during my time in the midwest, salaries were stagnant / sticky around $80k so I would caution against overestimating the trickle down effect of coastal income.
coldtea 8y ago
>Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. It's a arbitrary, but it's also useful to have a cutoff point. And due to power laws, as you observed, falling below that is already too low.
Nomentatus 8y ago
Do you find topographical maps arbitrary and misleading too? 'Cause it's the same method. What alternative methodology for describing the wealth peak do you prefer? With luck, maybe we'll be able to take it and improve our maps, too.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  A standard density function would do fine, and not have a wholly artificial dependence on bucket width. What's a topological map?
  - Nomentatus 8y ago
    Got it - you won't draw any line; that way nobody in particular is responsible or has to do anything. This sort of maneuver is surely just what the author means when he says a central tactic of the 9.9% is: "the pretense of being part of the middle as one of our strategies for remaining on top." The OP argument in a nutshell: "In the United States, it’s the children of the bottom decile and, above all, the top decile—the 9.9 percent—who settle down nearest to their starting point." So how would using just a function, so as not to embarrass any one class, fix that?
- anbende 8y ago
  I think this is a little different. It's not the whole methodology that's the problem. It's the non-standard bin-sizes. If he wants to do log or exponential sizes, then it's 90.1, 9, .9 or you could round it off to 90, 9, and 1. By making it 90, 9.9 and .1, then he's artificially inflated the middle bin size while simultaneously exclaiming that this bin has more wealth in it than expected. It's like having a y-axis on a graph that reads: 10 100 5000 10000 (with equally spaced points) and then talking about how there's more action between 100 and 5000 than there is between 5000 and 10000.
  - Nomentatus 8y ago
    9.9 is the top ten percent minus the .1 percent - he agrees the .1% are a problem, but wants to address his own class, the rest of the top 10% = 9.9%. That bin has the size it has, and the measured effects he points to presumably deduct the stats for the .1%. There's no trickery, just a stat or two to conjure with. If you think he's skewed the measure by using mean instead of median or mode and not subtracting the contributions of the .1% that's an interesting argument but you have to make it - show evidence of that, plus make the calculation to demonstrate that the effect is large. If that's the argument I might suggest dropping "bin size" and employing the term "skew."
apatters 8y ago
The premise of the article is so ridiculous that I wonder if it's a false flag. "The 9.9," by and large, are not the ones who have subverted the basic American principles of democratic governance, free markets, and equal opportunity via regulatory capture. They aren't rich enough. The 1% is. I wonder who paid Matthew Stewart, an Oxford-educated management consultant for "large financial institutions,"[1] to write such an article. [1] http://mwstewart.com/about/ http://mwstewart.com/about/
skookumchuck 8y ago
> holds 40% of US wealth The government holds most of the wealth.
tejtm 8y ago
Although I agree it is a continuum, And I would like to think I am not contributing to the problem, I will point out that we in general are not the ones to choose where the cutoff is and historically, revolutionary retribution strikes deeper than the top 1%.

eternalban 8y ago

I couldn't help but think of Eyes Wide Shut when reading this. For those who have seen the film, the leading character, a physician who lives in Upper East Side in Manhattan, easily fits the bill (npi) of being a 9.9%er. But as Kubrick makes it clear, he is merely a well paid servant of the true hidden aristocracy, and very much preoccupied with matters that are of no concern to the aristocratic class. I agree with the other commentators' critique of OP here. The 9.9%ers are the new Social 'Thin Blue Line' [1]. Here's the recruitment advert in case you are interested :) https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line

kolbe 8y ago
That was just a fictional movie, man. I wouldn't read too much into that.
- sgt101 8y ago
  Bit like Chekhov?

matthewaveryusa 8y ago

The top 10% is 120k in income or 1.2m in net worth -- would be nice to see the demographics. In any case, 1.2m in net worth is a house with some retirement money, not exactly what I would call aristocracy.

mrybczyn 8y ago
And yet it's more than 90.1% of the population posesses... Interestingly, some estimates of (formal) Polish aristocracy in the 17th century place it around 10% of the population. Maybe this is just some natural distribution of socio-econo-political status of human groups.
- gaius 8y ago
  And yet it's more than 90.1% of the population posesses... These analyses tend to overlook the age dimension. It is entirely normal that a 65-year-old about to retire would have accumulated more assets than a 22-year-old who has just graduated with student debts. So is the proportion of the population holding the wealth also the proportion of the population who has been working and saving for 30-40 years already? If so there is nothing to see here, move along...
  - e12e 8y ago
    > So is the proportion of the population holding the wealth also the proportion of the population who has been working and saving for 30-40 years already? I doubt it: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/graphics/population/US_popgraph%202016.bmp https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
- tscs37 8y ago
  As another comment here pointed out; 90.1% possess about 30% of the wealth. 9% possess another 30% of the wealth. The remaining 0.9% possess the rest. Is the 9% to blame for inequality?
  - 8y ago

p49k 8y ago

Rebuttal from Slate: https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-percent-the-1-percent-are-still-the-problem.html?via=gdpr-consent https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-atlantics-9-9-...

sologoub 8y ago
Key paragraph: “He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees. According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution. Stewart’s “9.9 percent” includes a lot of working professionals and business owners with gilded academic résumés, sure. But it also probably encompasses a lot of 75-year-old former accountants and nurses and guys with construction businesses who made a comfortable living decades ago, bought a house, and paid down the mortgage while saving for retirement. There’s no real way to tell a consistent story about who these people are, which makes it a bit hard to blame them for the death of opportunity in this country.”
- refurb 8y ago
  This is a great rebuttal. We seem to ignore that wealth changes over a person's life. When average wages are dropping, are they actually dropping or are wealthy people leaving the workforce at a greater rate than lower income people (just starting their careers) entering it? Kind of what we'd expect when the baby boomers retire, no?
  - DrPhish 8y ago
    Census Canada has an income explorer that includes wealth percentiles by age (and sex, by province etc) http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dv-vd/inc-rev/index-eng.cfm http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dv-... It's quite a stark difference in the percentiles from 20 to 40 to 60. Slate is absolutely right that without further controls for things like age, these percentiles are misleading

mistrial9 8y ago

This headline feeds into knee-jerk tendency to assign a simple social class category to some combination of money, prestige, agency (ability to drive change) and status; from the ground-view, reality is nothing like that now. There is no simple formula for any of those things, being very well decoupled.

dgreensp 8y ago

Wait, so 10% of the county is millionaires (more or less, if 9.9% are 1.2-millionaires), and these people have such “good family, good health, and good jobs” that they might as well be a different species? If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? I think the author’s intent was to acknowledge privilege, but the article is just making more weird caricatures. I think it’s better to put a spotlight on particular ways people might not be able to advance themselves as much as the usual narrative would suggest.

hobls 8y ago
edit: Whoops. My recollection of the article was quite wrong! ---- No, the article states that the average wealth of the 9.9% is 1.2m. This is of course heavily influenced by people at in the top 1%; people in the 10th percentile are not all millionaires.
- dgreensp 8y ago
  “As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 percent; $2.4 million to reach the group’s median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 percent.”
LateRuin 8y ago
>If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a millionaire or not? Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents / divorced / never married
- analog31 8y ago
  I wouldn't have thought this until I had kids, who "forced" me to greatly expand my social milieu beyond my fellow geeks and musicians. Our kids got involved in some activities (e.g., violin lessons) that are almost exclusively the domain of the upper middle class. I remember attending a large group recital with maybe 100 kids, and virtually none of them were obese.

mozumder 8y ago

Class differentiation is the central meaning of life. The struggle is the point. You get up and wear nice clothes in the morning so that you're better than the slob that doesn't. Nobody wants to be the same as everyone else. If everyone was equal, then there would be no point in your existence. You become a bag of mostly water. Celebrate the fact that a few billionaires and royalty and celebrities exists. Life is more interesting and surprising that way. Can you imagine how terrible and pointless everything would be if everyone was middle class? We should focus on the very bottom, not the very top.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Can you imagine how terrible everything would be if everyone was middle class? It would be a vast improvement over the status quo, where most people are either working class or underclass. > We should focus on the very bottom, not the very top. They aren't separate issues, they are aspects of the same issue.
wybiral 8y ago
It's possible for us to focus both on improving conditions at the very bottom and also trying to understand how a very small percentage at the very top is siphoning so much out of our shared system. I would argue that both issues are worth looking at.
- ainiriand 8y ago
  We have people very rich, more than ever before. And that is just by itself something worth of careful examination. But a lot of that wealth is new. There are effective mechanisms to not being poor. More people can access to self-improvement tools than ever before. So yes, we should focus on the lower end of the scale.
  - wybiral 8y ago
    > a lot of that wealth is new Where is the "new" wealth coming from? > There are effective mechanisms to not being poor. That seems like a generalization to me that doesn't factor in location, race, access to good education, medical conditions, existing debt, etc. > So yes, we should focus on the lower end of the scale. Why not both?

leetcrew 8y ago

> Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. this statement is literally true, but aside from "in relative terms", the wording of the whole sentence seems to evoke a zero sum game. I see this type of writing in most articles about inequality and I wish the authors would strive to be more explicit. it's an important distinction, even if we agree that relative gains are just significant as absolute gains.

temp-dude-87844 8y ago
The explicit invocation of the concept "zero-sum" is avoided because it's a lightning rod for criticism, where someone will inevitably chime in to point out the realization of absolute gains of utility among the losers also; specifically, that important metrics like living standards have been improving for wide swaths of the population, even those whose share of wealth declined over time. And therein lies the disconnect: both can be true, because one of them is a tautology; and it just so happens that relative disparities in wealth among the pool of people in market for a service will cause the competition to attain some elements of an auction, and cause the poorer parties to lose out.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  to be clear, I am not criticizing the author for not explicitly using the term "zero-sum game"; however dysfunctional the economy may be, it is clearly not that. I am criticizing the author for writing about relative gains using language (e.g. "pie", "taking from", "giving up") that is clearly evocative of a zero sum game. it encourages the uncareful reader to conflate absolute and relative gains.
tachyonbeam 8y ago
Except it isn't really true. Much of the economic recovery post 2008 was fueled by the FED buying assets. They've been buying stocks and bonds to keep the prices rising. So the FED has been directly handing money to people who own stocks and bonds. We can argue as to whether this is better, worse or functionally equivalent to directly taking money from the middle class, but it isn't exactly the same thing. I personally wish that instead of printing money to buy stocks and bonds, they had enacted something like UBI instead. Give the money you're printing to people who need it. I think it's actually better for a capitalist economy, because then corporations still need to compete to get that money from consumers, instead of just being bailed out, which rewards failing corporations.

seibelj 8y ago

I believe very strongly in equality of opportunity, and the liberal tendency to zone everything to prevent development and keep out the poors is a glaring example of hipocrisy. I don’t know if charter schools are the answer, but certainly letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power.

distances 8y ago
> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in continuous power. Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and additional funding for troubled areas in need?
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  A K-12 student's performance correlates strongly with the family's wealth [1], and interacts with several other factors like race category, stable home life, and the low incidence of everyday violent crime. If rich people successfully exclude poor people, which can be done with legal price mechanisms instead of illegal discrimination, public school performance remains high. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Even without price there are other mechanisms - accumulation of rich in specific places by word of mouth alone... where the influence and money is accumulated and applied. We see this even in primary education even in Europe, even in non-private schools. Then there are extracurriculars which take money amd time... A typical person out of place won't be able to keep up.
    - 8y ago

ryandrake 8y ago

In the past, nobody really attacked the rich because so many Americans think they'll one day be in their shoes. In 2003, we learned that 19% of Americans think they are in the richest 1% and a further 20% expect to be someday [1]. People have slowly woken up to the fact that their math was way off and class mobility doesn't really work that way. The brief "Occupy" movement and the identification of the 1% as a species largely unlike the rest of us shined a big spotlight on a class of people who would rather not receive so much attention. This article seems to be almost deliberately engineered to downplay the 1%-vs-99% narrative that once illustrated a distinct oil-vs-water class divide in the country. How better to confuse people about who the villains are than to muddy the water by adding "slightly richer normal people" into the mix with the plutocrats and Wall Street billionaires. This almost reads as a PR piece, straight from the desk of the Koch brothers or a Wall Street managing director: "Look over there! There's a hard working father of two who owns a few laundromats and a family doctor with a vacation home! Those guys are totally relatable to you poor people, just like us billionaires!" 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hope-over-self-interest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-ho...

CM30 8y ago
> How better to confuse people about who the villains are than to muddy the water by adding "slightly richer normal people" into the mix with the plutocrats and Wall Street billionaires. Eh, I feel that was done more by the increased focus on social issues and race/gender/whatever tensions to be honest. Isn't it super convenient that all these identity politics wars came about JUST after Occupy and the possibility the rich were going to be in the firing line? Or that class usually isn't mentioned there?

FrozenVoid 8y ago

A clever manipulation piece: It melds 1% multi-millionaires with upper-middle class to create some kind of bourgeois enemy. In reality these 32 million people have different lifestyles, sources of income and their networth does not indicate true wealth: they could be living in an expensive house that they bought much cheaper, but a few trips into a hospital will bankrupt them. The whole concept of "net worth" is highly deceptive and can be manipulated into framing economic importance as function of potential wealth(if "X sold all their property" vs actual currency reserves).

CamTin 8y ago
Not accounting for people's home equity when determining their wealth is one of the most bonkers bougie things I've ever heard. Should we not count their 401k savings either, because "if X took the early withdrawal penalty" isn't fair either? If you're rich, you're rich. It makes no difference if that wealth is tied up in illiquid assets. If the precarity if your financial situation is based on the fact that you're worth millions but have decided for some reason to leave it invested in one large, volatile asset, then you don't get to claim you're in the same boat as someone who is pawning their wedding ring until payday to make rent. Being rich but poorly invested (90% of your net worth is in your home equity) is a decision you made, not a situation you found yourself born into.
- matthewdgreen 8y ago
  If every single person in the country made exactly the same salary, and saved the same percentage of their income to cover the exact same modest retirement lifestyle, you'd still have people (close to retirement) who appeared "rich" and people early in their career who appeared relatively "poor". Using wealth data without normalizing for age you could also make it look like there was a vastly unequal society, and of course there would no policy you could adopt to "fix" the problem that wasn't there. What the author is doing here is literally the definition of bad data science.
- FrozenVoid 8y ago
  >If you're rich, you're rich. I'm not even middle class, i don't own a house or a car. I just see that people easily overgeneralize the well-off 30 million upper-middle class with truly rich people who have entirely different lifestyle. Believing the there is 32million strong aristocracy is delusional, all these SJW privilege Olympics make your kind seem insane and full of envy. You want to lump middle-class people with multi-millionaires with financial security and proclaim them the unified burgeios enemy that must be dealt with. "If they have some money, They're rich capitalist pigs" Its like some soviet union guilt trip: If you own jeans your dangerous bourgie class traitor! If you listen to foreign radio = capitalist lapdog. If you own foreign currency = speculator and capitalist. Soviet Union glamorized poverty and struggle, everyone was LARPing as some poor, honest worker despite a black market,blat and bribery being commonplace. If you dislike Bourgeois(aka Middle class) so much, why don't take one-way ticket flight to socialist paradise of Venezuela? They're getting rid of their toxic privileged Bourgeois class. Just for the record i'm NOT some "free-market will fix it" capitalist: I'm in favor of sane, Scandinavian-like system of democracy(also promoted by Bernie Sanders as democratic socialism) which exist with support of high taxes. I'm against gulags, wealth redistribution and marking people as class traitors/privileged/"eat the Rich", to which any communist country eventually devolves.

Areading314 8y ago

"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below" The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been "transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this: https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...

tedeh 8y ago
They key term is of course "at a slower rate" which implies more and more of the total wealth of society is accumulated at the top.
dahauns 8y ago
"The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate." For the last two decades, your source actually says the opposite. The lowest three quintiles peaked in the dot-com bubble, with the bottom quintile losing the most (almost 10%) and only the middle quintile just recently reaching those levels again.
- Areading314 8y ago
  Agreed, I meant over time as in over the last century. Interesting that the 90s was this much of a peak though!
imbokodo 8y ago
As all wealth that can be created comes from work, and as the heirs who mostly make up the 0.1% do not work, it follows that the wealth comes from those below. Actually the article has a fairly conservative vantage. As the pie is not what is significant. The wealth and money and pie have little significance. What matters is the expropriation of surplus labor time, by the heir, from the one who works. It is a social relationship, expropriating the worker's time. The pie, the wealth, the product is not what has significance here.

acjohnson55 8y ago

I see this piece less as an identification of the 9.9% as being "the problem" so much as it is a call to get people who are doing well to acknowledge that we exist in a vortex of generational success that is rather exclusive of most of the country.

spaceman1331 8y ago

> you're probably part of the problem > YOU'RE PROBABLY PART OF THE PROBLEM > YOU'RE PART OF THE PROBLEM > YOU'RE THE PROBLEM Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go send your sons to exile To serve your captives' need -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden

spicymaki 8y ago

The reporting on this seems rather empty. Yes economic inequality is growing, yes the new rich are delusional about it, and yes that will lead to economic and social catastrophe. Elites like being elite because it excludes everyone else. That’s the point of it. How do you convince those in power to not consolidate it and pass it on to their offspring?

danharaj 8y ago
Insurrection, if it comes to that?

fpig 8y ago

If you pick 4.73% or 17.23% as the cutoff point you will reach the same conclusions, the numbers behave as you would expect. I read a similar article once that focused on the top 20% by income, this one focuses on top 10% by wealth... The reality is that there is no "aristocratic cutoff point" - people get richer (and their incomes go up) faster smoothly as you go towards the right on the curve. I don't understand why the author feels his "top 10%" cutoff is somehow especially insightful and "smarter" than the 1% one. It is entirely arbitrary. He says: “We are the 99 percent” sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an analysis. But if you do an analysis of the 1%, the advantages you ascribe to the 9.9% will hold much more strongly. If you do it for the top 20% they will also hold, but less strongly. You just picked a number and ran with it. There is nothing insightful there. Income inequality has been growing but what the author is attempting to do is childish, although the article is surprisingly well-written considering how stupid the core idea is.

mark212 8y ago
because it gives him a nice chart: the top 0.1% have been taking the gains away from the bottom 90% -- while that 9.9% in between has been holding steady. And I agree, it's a stupid core idea.
tlb 8y ago
Most readers aren't in the 1%, but most (Atlantic Monthly) readers are in the 10%. Articles about the 1% are about "them"; articles about the 10% are about "us". That's a reasonable premise for an article: move the goalpost and show what it's like to be on the other side of it.
adventured 8y ago
It's meant to expand the class warfare numbers, that's the sole purpose of moving the goalpost from the 1% to the 10%. You could just as easily set the line at the top 1/3, because that group in the US is better off than any top 1/3 in any other nation. The US controls ~35% of all wealth on earth, with 4% of the population; that wealth is almost all stacked among the top ~85 million adults - a bit more than 1% of the world's population. Among those 85 million adults, there are over 11 million millionaires [1]. Nothing like that mass affluence exists anywhere else. So if you really wanted to push the class warfare game to its inevitable conclusion, you'd pit the majority bottom 2/3 against the minority top 1/3. If you were a nefarious type, this also works particularly well because it pits whites & asians against blacks & hispanics, as those groups largely divide by those income/wealth lines. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans-are-now-millionaires-new-study-shows.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/a-record-number-of-americans...

mirko22 8y ago

Which form of society would allow for complete equality? Where everyone has the same things to eat, drink and learn and everyone is missing the same things (usually luxury). I can’t think of any social system like that mostly cos it all involves people and not all people are the same and will behave differently inevitably wanting different stuff which will lead to more more inequality over time. Maybe someone has ideas?

prolikewhoa 8y ago
Socialism, Communism? The workers owning the means of production and abolition of private property? Cuba is doing fairly fine despite decades of American propaganda & the embargo. It has its problems, but so does USA or any country for that matter.
- mirko22 8y ago
  Not necessarily existing system. Any system where people are truly equal. Even in communism you will have leaders, and leaders will enjoy some form of higher privilege. So collective ownership of the, in lack of the better word, stuff would still not abolish social privileges, which people renowned in some manner would have. Likewise, different responsibility instiled in people by any means, will undoubtedly lead to different performance in the work place, which will, in some way or other, separate them from general social or material status. So, it seems to me, best we could do is some form of society wich has low band of frequency in which people can move in any type of self emerging hierarchy so everyone enjoys nearly the same status. But how do you deal with over achievers then? There would inevitably be people who, with their performance, go out of that band. You might start by separating achievers that contribute or take from society which would then lead to having some form of arbitars which would in turn again enyjoy some type of higher status. And so on... the only truly equal society is the one where everyone share the same thoughts and goals and do the same things, as any deviation into something new could spell special privileges for that individual. And i do this only as a thought experiment, cos I am stuck in the loop of if not all people think and do the same thing how can we expect them to be same... So maybe someone has ideas about this. Maybe I am just crazy.
8y ago

zneveu 8y ago

I really enjoyed reading this piece. The author poses several rhetorical questions that I think could use evidence to support their assumed conclusions, but overall this piece seems very well informed and sheds light on a class of people that I am very familiar with but had never divided out in my head.

reggieband 8y ago

This was a very long article so it doesn't surprise me that most people are commenting on the 9.9% figure while missing the authors point. I've seen a similar point made several times recently and it goes something like this: The "true elites" have constructed a social and economic system that syphons off the majority of wealth. The "wannabe elites" at the top of the remaining pile are actually complicit servants of the elite (who cares if it is 9%, 11% or whatever). These wannabes enjoy their privileges but realize their position is precarious. Their anxiety at losing this position makes them more eager servants to the elites and they become highly protective of their own positions. Maintaining wannabe elite status is more important than effecting societal change and it consumes all of their available resources and time. The people at the bottom of the system are always upset and spend most of their time fighting amongst themselves and scheming on how to get into the privileged wannabe group. They spend all of their resources and time just trying to survive. There is a constant threat that if this rabble becomes angry enough then they will violently revolt. The elites like to remind the wannabes that when the pitchforks come out then it will be for the wannabes, those soft/weak knowledge workers who are unable to fly to their second home in Europe. So, it is really in the wannabes best interest to quell the dissent. In this narrative, the alliance between the insanely rich and the dirt poor makes sense. The real elites let the educated wannabes know they have their finger on the button. They do so in subtle think pieces in the kind of magazines the rabble won't read. Don't forget, your comfortable lifestyle is predicated on serving the elites. If individually you rebel then you will lose your privileges. If en-masse you rebel then there will be a violent revolt directed at you. Good luck finding a way out of all of this is what the author leaves us with. The wannabes are the dupes in a con-game. We think we are in on the con and yet we also realize that if things go bad then we'll be the ones left holding the bag. We're being taught to accept an inherit complicity as a means to convince us to keep going along with it. You already knew everything there was to know before you read this article.

roywiggins 8y ago
This tripartite split (elite, bourgeois, poor) is a very old one. I am sure I read a paper in an undergrad poly-sci course that analyzed the fate of nations based on which two teamed up against the third. Elites+poor is a pretty dangerous combination because they end up catching civil society in the pincers.

arduanika 8y ago

Reading this article makes me think of the word choice that new button on Facebook that lets you report that a link is a "false" news story. Notice the subtle shift away from the populist phrase — the accusation is not that the news is "false", but rather "fake". The facts in this piece are by and large true (although if you look closely you can see a few opinions and judgement calls that have calcified into facts). However, Stewart's class confessional is the essence of "fake news", in that it assumes a viewpoint, speaks authoritatively and factually from it, and ignores the gaping details that would contradict his story. The assumed viewpoint gets slipped into the middle of a sentence like this: "Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below". Read: increases in absolute wealth do not matter; it's all about the Joneses. Just as when postmodernists academics obsess over power hierarchies, you can see the hunger for power at the core of their doctrine, so it is here: when pop-socio-economists talk to no end about inequality, you can see that they are driven not by a desire to improve conditions, but by envy and by (as Stewart projects onto the Trump base) resentment. Where is the discussion of poverty here? Stewart cares not a whit about poverty. Ctrl-F for it: the single instance of is in the phrase “relative poverty”. Thus we get a sentence such as “We are the staff that runs the machine that funnels resources from the 90 percent to the 0.1 percent”, which is dynamite verbiage if you clicked on this article in order to wallow in your upper middle class guilt. But read closer: the wealth of the 90% has, in point of fact, not gone down, merely stagnated. They have not been funneled from, except in these relative, zero-sum terms. As far as the “gaping details”, any discussion of inequality that is so myopically focused on one country in the global system is missing the big picture. Here’s what’s been going on with actual, absolute wealth since the 70’s: huge swaths of the developing world have been raised out of poverty. A few lucky, skilled, well-positioned, and/or hardworking elites, both in the US and abroad, have gotten fabulously rich off the new global economy. And yes, incomes for the bottom 90% in the US and Western Europe, far from keeping pace with this global growth, have risen hardly at all. (How does this story of massive poverty relief play out for the secondary concern of inequality? Exactly as advertised in every true-but-fake screed, wealth inequality has skyrocketed within the United States, and within China, and within [insert your country here, probably]. What is scrupulously avoided by Stewart and others is that, as the gap between countries narrows, the overall contour and slope of the global wealth distribution has remained roughly constant). If you do care to grapple with the messy data, you could pick worse starting places than here: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality (although you can see in the title that Roser and Ortiz-Ospina are already starting from two wrong premises: that “inequality”, not poverty, is the topic at hand, and that “income”, not wealth, is the natural locus of that inequality). However, Stewart mentions none of this. If we assume good faith, we can chock the omission up to Stewart’s ignorance and his meager qualification to preach on this topic. If we assume bad faith, then his careful aggregation of confirmatory true facts and dismissal of the big picture data is straight up mendacious, or as the tweeter of the best words puts it, fake. Note that this characterization is not personally specific to Stewart. It applies also to the fake rebuttal from Slate in the link above. Both magazines assume the premise that inequality is the problem, not poverty, and then they bicker about the cutoff point. Of course the 1% gatekeeps against the 99%! You could write just as incisive (and factually correct) an analysis of the 0.1% gatekeeping against the 99.9%, or of the 5% against the 95%, and on down the line. But to say that gatekeeping is the whole story is to succumb to the zero-sum fallacy. To say that violins exist merely to get my kid into Harvard ahead of yours is reductionistic, impoverished thinking that may help you sleep but will not, in the long run, win you any elections. The wealth story is global. Progress is real. The pie has gotten bigger. Poverty, not inequality, is the issue to tackle. Teapot Dome and Enron are the exception, not the rule. Facts are messy. Class is a continuum. And to suggest otherwise is fake news.

kayeetong 8y ago

Those doctors, dentists and lawyers he mentions are drowning in loans - https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-student-loans-how-did-that-happen-1527252975 https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-stud...

throw2016 8y ago

The embrace of neoliberalism in the 80s decimated the traditional middle class. Wages stagnated and labor share of income has taken a hit [1] while capital ascended. Debt has become the biggest product leading to wide scale financialization and rent seeking. Lobbying and revolving doors has further added to entrenched interests benefiting at the cost of the whole. This is at the heart of how you define a country, a collection of economic interests arbitrated by the market as an end in itself, or a 'society' with larger goals. The neoliberalism agenda has convinced many of the first. [1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/capitals-share-income-way-higher-think.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/capitals-share-incom...

solidsnack9000 8y ago

It is entirely possible to get a good education at the many schools that don’t count as “good” in our brand-obsessed system. But the “bad” ones really are bad for you. For those who made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents, our society offers a kind of virtual education system. It has places that look like colleges—but aren’t really. It has debt—and that, unfortunately, is real. The people who enter into this class hologram do not collect a college premium; they wind up in something more like indentured servitude. A surreal and sad vision.

LoonyBalloony 8y ago
What better way to teach kids how the real world works then scamming them?

solidsnack9000 8y ago

Many commenters have highlighted faults in this article. Maybe the 9.9% aren't to blame; maybe they aren't a meaningful classification to begin with; maybe there is more to the story than people hauling the ladder up after themselves. Yet these criticisms miss the author's warning: regardless of the causes, when substantial inequality obtains, opting into the social contract looks like a good idea for a smaller and smaller subset of people. That's when civil society falls apart. To not beggar thy neighbor is not only generosity, fairness, respect for human dignity -- it is also prudence.