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Don't fall for it: > This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net

Don't fall for it: > This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth. The "top 1%" and "bottom half" are categories, not entities. They are made up of different people in 1989 and 2019, not the same people getting richer and poorer respectively. The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less. This is not what the statistic means.

viivaux 7y ago
> The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people getting more and more money, and poorer people getting less and less There is no language in the article to justify this statement. None. And btw, statistics on class mobility are pretty damning in themselves, if you care to look them up.
ajross 7y ago
So... what is the lesson you want us to take away? It's true that individuals have varying amounts of success and move in and out of any given bracket all the time, but why is that important to what is clearly a demographic point? On average, if you were poor in the 80's you're poorer now. Some of your poor cohort aren't as poor, and some have lifted themselves out of poverty entirely. Yet more of them are doing worse than they were. That's bad, right? It's a problem you'd like to see fixed, yes? And it certainly is what the statistic means.
- rland 7y ago
  Not only that. It'd be better to be poor in the 1980s, because since then it has become more difficult to move out of poverty.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
> The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less. That's exactly what it means, though. If you hold an investment for a long time, the returns compound. So your wealth grows exponentially. Conversely, for the poor (debtors, really), compound interest works against you. For example, a college graduate could have an income-based repayment plan and see their student loan balance grow, because of the compounding interest. One of my friends on social media posted about this horror in their financial life this recently. Do some wealthy people lose everything? Sure, lottery ticket winners often do. Do some poor people ascend to the 1%? Yes, many immigrants of modest means come to the USA and found successful companies within the United States (proportionally, when compared to citizens born here). But the takeaway of increasing income inequality is very real. A small silver lining: The U.S. middle class is shrinking, but that's because a good number are moving into the upper middle class, depending on where you draw the lines between "middle class" and "upper middle class". Using inflation-adjusted dollars, more households bring in $100k than just two decades ago.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ballenarosada 7y ago
Don't fall for what? The fact that some people move between percentiles during their life doesn't change the fact that the distribution has grown more unequal. What the number means is that, while those who are poor are poorer now in relative terms than 1989, the rich have gotten richer in relative terms.
mindcandy 7y ago
I think the message is more about general inequality rather than individual progress. Over the past 30 years the histogram of wealth distribution has skewed even more heavily to whomever happens to be at the top at the moment. We've gone from approximately a 12:1 ratio for 1%:50% to about a 150:-1 ratio. -1!
microwavecamera 7y ago
I'm sorry, that argument fails under the weight of it's own logic, or rather, lack thereof.
BLanen 7y ago
How is this even a counterargument? You concede the point and then post a hypothetical that's not relevant. And that hypothetical (meritocratic social mobility) is even dubious.

viivaux 7y ago

> The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people getting more and more money, and poorer people getting less and less There is no language in the article to justify this statement. None. And btw, statistics on class mobility are pretty damning in themselves, if you care to look them up.

ajross 7y ago

So... what is the lesson you want us to take away? It's true that individuals have varying amounts of success and move in and out of any given bracket all the time, but why is that important to what is clearly a demographic point? On average, if you were poor in the 80's you're poorer now. Some of your poor cohort aren't as poor, and some have lifted themselves out of poverty entirely. Yet more of them are doing worse than they were. That's bad, right? It's a problem you'd like to see fixed, yes? And it certainly is what the statistic means.

rland 7y ago
Not only that. It'd be better to be poor in the 1980s, because since then it has become more difficult to move out of poverty.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

> The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less. That's exactly what it means, though. If you hold an investment for a long time, the returns compound. So your wealth grows exponentially. Conversely, for the poor (debtors, really), compound interest works against you. For example, a college graduate could have an income-based repayment plan and see their student loan balance grow, because of the compounding interest. One of my friends on social media posted about this horror in their financial life this recently. Do some wealthy people lose everything? Sure, lottery ticket winners often do. Do some poor people ascend to the 1%? Yes, many immigrants of modest means come to the USA and found successful companies within the United States (proportionally, when compared to citizens born here). But the takeaway of increasing income inequality is very real. A small silver lining: The U.S. middle class is shrinking, but that's because a good number are moving into the upper middle class, depending on where you draw the lines between "middle class" and "upper middle class". Using inflation-adjusted dollars, more households bring in $100k than just two decades ago.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ballenarosada 7y ago

Don't fall for what? The fact that some people move between percentiles during their life doesn't change the fact that the distribution has grown more unequal. What the number means is that, while those who are poor are poorer now in relative terms than 1989, the rich have gotten richer in relative terms.

mindcandy 7y ago

I think the message is more about general inequality rather than individual progress. Over the past 30 years the histogram of wealth distribution has skewed even more heavily to whomever happens to be at the top at the moment. We've gone from approximately a 12:1 ratio for 1%:50% to about a 150:-1 ratio. -1!

microwavecamera 7y ago

I'm sorry, that argument fails under the weight of it's own logic, or rather, lack thereof.

BLanen 7y ago

How is this even a counterargument? You concede the point and then post a hypothetical that's not relevant. And that hypothetical (meritocratic social mobility) is even dubious.