11 ms·

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 mak

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.
        nostrademons 8y ago
        Who would you consider more of a capitalist, the apartment block owner who contracts with a property manager or the property manager who decides who to rent it to? The high-net-worth individual who deposits his capital with an asset manager, or the salaried fund manager who determines which securities to buy with it? The angel investor who puts $1M of his own money into a fledgling startup, or the entrepreneur who decides how it's spent? The hedge fund manager who has bought 40% of the company on Wall Street, or the CEO entrusted to make the daily decisions on company operation? I'm surprised the grandparent post has been downvoted, because when you get close to how capital is actually managed and invested, it's clear that it's a lot less clear than it looks from the outside. Even people who nominally have "control" over capital expenditures are subject to market returns. If they don't invest that capital correctly, they will lose the ability to manage more capital.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    > Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? 1. The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. That money provides a roof and access to quality education, but in almost all cases, it's not being efficiently deployed as capital. 2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority shareholder" vs. "just another investor". That's the difference between "controlling capital" and merely having a bit of skin in the game.
    - nordsieck 8y ago
      > The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment. If you're trying to make a distinction between income generating assets and assets that don't generate income, you're just digging yourself into a hole - housing doesn't generate income, but it does save cost - namely rental cost. In that sense, it is a better investment because the return is less risky. > 2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority shareholder" vs. "just another investor". That's the difference between "controlling capital" and merely having a bit of skin in the game. That's well and good, but it's just as true for most people above the 10% line as for those below. You have to get to some truly lofty heights before you find the activist investors.
      - gshubert17 8y ago
        > There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment. I thought of my house as a "use asset", like a car. It's nice when the house appreciates. But I couldn't sell it and "cash out" if I had to use the proceeds to buy another house. But, as you said, it saved on rental costs.
        Rotten194 8y ago
        Owning a house is an intergenerational investment -- your kids can sell it and make a tidy unearned profit on what you spent, or live in it and pocket that amount of money in not having to pay for another living arrangement. It contributes to the high IGE of the US the author was talking about.
  - Zigurd 8y ago
    There is a big difference between being in the target market for discretionary investments and small-time political fundraising, and being able to buy influence.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
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%.

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.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        Who would you consider more of a capitalist, the apartment block owner who contracts with a property manager or the property manager who decides who to rent it to? The high-net-worth individual who deposits his capital with an asset manager, or the salaried fund manager who determines which securities to buy with it? The angel investor who puts $1M of his own money into a fledgling startup, or the entrepreneur who decides how it's spent? The hedge fund manager who has bought 40% of the company on Wall Street, or the CEO entrusted to make the daily decisions on company operation? I'm surprised the grandparent post has been downvoted, because when you get close to how capital is actually managed and invested, it's clear that it's a lot less clear than it looks from the outside. Even people who nominally have "control" over capital expenditures are subject to market returns. If they don't invest that capital correctly, they will lose the ability to manage more capital.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > Who "just has money" and doesn't control capital? 1. The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. That money provides a roof and access to quality education, but in almost all cases, it's not being efficiently deployed as capital. 2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority shareholder" vs. "just another investor". That's the difference between "controlling capital" and merely having a bit of skin in the game.
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    > The vast majority of middle class wealth is locked up in (non-investment) housing. There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment. If you're trying to make a distinction between income generating assets and assets that don't generate income, you're just digging yourself into a hole - housing doesn't generate income, but it does save cost - namely rental cost. In that sense, it is a better investment because the return is less risky. > 2. Whatever remaining money that is deployed as capital, is not done so in a way that implies control over their chosen investments. Think "majority shareholder" vs. "just another investor". That's the difference between "controlling capital" and merely having a bit of skin in the game. That's well and good, but it's just as true for most people above the 10% line as for those below. You have to get to some truly lofty heights before you find the activist investors.
    - gshubert17 8y ago
      > There are literally 0 people I know who think owning a house is not an investment. I thought of my house as a "use asset", like a car. It's nice when the house appreciates. But I couldn't sell it and "cash out" if I had to use the proceeds to buy another house. But, as you said, it saved on rental costs.
      - Rotten194 8y ago
        Owning a house is an intergenerational investment -- your kids can sell it and make a tidy unearned profit on what you spent, or live in it and pocket that amount of money in not having to pay for another living arrangement. It contributes to the high IGE of the US the author was talking about.
- Zigurd 8y ago
  There is a big difference between being in the target market for discretionary investments and small-time political fundraising, and being able to buy influence.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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%.