8 ms·

Whenever I see stats like this that don't account for age, I ignore them. They are worthless. It compares a recent Stanford grad from a wealthy family to a 55-

Whenever I see stats like this that don't account for age, I ignore them. They are worthless. It compares a recent Stanford grad from a wealthy family to a 55-year-old who was scraping through the first 35-40 years of life, but now makes $190k/yr as a successful tradesman during boom time. The former will count as "poor" and the latter will count as "top 10%". In other words, no, it's not comparing Americans of different classes. It's comparing Americans at different stages of life. Or just the ebb and flow of income over and individual's life (selling a house even in a modest area can easily put you into the top 10% for a year). You need to follow individuals over their lives to get a better picture of who is struggling and who is thriving.

darth_avocado 5y ago
Am I the only one seeing a lot of headlines pitting top 10% against the rest? It’s disingenuous to make up headlines like this without mentioning too 10% consists of, you guessed it, top 1% which owns more than 50% of all the stocks.
- dominotw 5y ago
  oh yea i saw this recently too. here is one from last week that was making the rounds. "The problem with America’s semi-rich" https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-meritocracy-matthew-stewart https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-me...
- thinkloop 5y ago
  Top 1%? How disingenuous can you be, that's made up of the top 0.01% who own 30% of the top 1%'s wealth alone [1] [1] https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...
  - darth_avocado 5y ago
    I agree. I just didn't have the stats to back me up when I wrote that. You are talking about wealth and not stocks, but you make the same point that I'm trying to make, which is that, top x% can be very misleading and clickbaity if you ignore the extreme inequality at the very top and can push the narrative in a direction that's not helpful. Thank you for bringing that up. I'd not be surprised it like 100 people in the country own 20% of all the stocks.
- chmod600 5y ago
  The top 10% is not a static category. People move in and out all the time as a result of ordinary life changes (rising income as you enter prime working years, selling assets to buy a house, selling a house, job loss, etc.). It doesn't really make sense to be mad at the 10%, because it will probably include you or others in your family unless you are really stuck. And there are a lot of people who are stuck. Let's not diminish that. But we will never address that if we are conflating them with young people who just happen to have a low income today but have every reason to see themselves in the middle class.
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    > People move in and out all the time as a result of ordinary life changes (rising income as you enter prime working years, selling assets to buy a house, selling a house, job loss, etc.). The article refers to the top 10% wealthiest, everything you mentioned is related to income.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  The thing is, the top 10% tend to vote with the top 1% and for the same reasons.
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
> Whenever I see stats like this that don't account for age, I ignore them. They are worthless. This, this, 100 times this. I wish I could upvote you 100 times. Yes, exactly that. I agree with you 100% on this.
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
Your complaint would have always applied to this stat. The fact that it is at an all-time record high signifies that something has changed.
- chmod600 5y ago
  The reaction then should be curiosity and a starting place for research, not the uninformed outrage that the article is peddling. Once you start looking at the numbers behind this, it's almost guaranteed that the real picture will be less outragous and suggest different policy prescriptions than whatever you might think looking at the headline. Or maybe you already know the details, and already know what we should do. But if so, you got your information from elsewhere, because the article doesn't offer much.
standardUser 5y ago
That's a myth. There's plenty of data on this. Most American never get anywhere close to the top 10% - not even remotely - regardless of age. The idea that everyone is just waiting around for their career to advance enough to put them in the upper-middle class is ludicrous on its face. Just as ludicrous as the myth that only high school kids work for minimum wage.
- cscurmudgeon 5y ago
  Data says what you are saying is false. US is high in social mobility. #27 and improving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  The top 10% are worth a ton, there’s not getting around that. But not slicing by age really does muddy things. The US median net worth for 65-74 is over a quarter million dollars. The median net worth for under 35 is $14k. That’s about a 20x difference! Anything that doesn’t split by age is nearly impossible to interpret. For reference the top 10% net worth splits at about $1.2M, so both of your points are important.
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    yeah that largely accounts for the racial wealth gap as well (though not completely). As median age by race varies by over a decade.
  - airza 5y ago
    Sure, but the reason for that isn’t that they simply haven’t lived long enough to accure wealth. Younger generational cohorts have less than their parents did at the same age.
    - daddylongstroke 5y ago
      I think this can also be split by class and background to provide further clarity. For example, every single one of my classmates (we were all lower income people) and myself are head and shoulders above where our parents were at our age or at about the save level with us facing significantly less work and stress to get here. I have a feeling middle-income and upper-income people have seen something different than us.
temp8964 5y ago
Yes. This same kind of error also applies to racial comparisons. A large component of racial disparate in income is caused by age gap. One would assume that different races have the same age distribution, but in reality it is not. The difference is huge, see: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common...
- vmception 5y ago
  That's the tip of the iceberg, a lot of privilege and inequality discussion marginalizes younger white people that would otherwise be interested in helping make society more egalitarian. At best, many people get a freedom from some distractions, but the term privilege does not convey that well, which is very counterproductive, so that chart could help a lot!
  - twofornone 5y ago
    I think demonizing so called privilege is cultural suicide, because most of what "privilege" amounts to is parents caring for their children and passing on successful cultural values. You don't want to foster cultural movements that discourage this behavior if you want a functioning society.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Privilege isn't parents taking better care of their children, it's parents doing a better job at taking care of their children than others, and multiple other things.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        What, in your thinking, is the difference between "taking better care" and "doing a better job at taking care"? Or are you saying that the difference is "than others"? Isn't that kind of implied by "better"?
ricardoplouis 5y ago
That's a fair point assuming upward economic mobility in the U.S but statistically speaking it's more likely someone stays rich or stays poor than it is that they move upward into a different bracket entirely https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does-poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... While it is true that much of the recent wealth in the U.S. is self-made and not entirely inherited. It's also true that a child born poor in this country is far more likely to stay as such than they are to become part of the top 10%. If we lived in an egalitarian society, then pointing out the wealth of the top 10% might be divisive, but considering that our current wealth inequality is worst than 1774 France, then I believe it's a fairly accurate picture being painted. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-inco...
- ghostwriter 5y ago
  > It's also true that a child born poor in this country is far more likely to stay as such than they are to become part of the top 10%. how many of them get to the top 20%, how many more get to the top 30%? in other words, there's no need to be the best basketball player to succeed in life. > but considering that our current wealth inequality is worst than 1774 France, then I believe it's a fairly accurate picture being painted. wealth inequality is a meaningless measure, as J. K. Rowling increased it the moment she published her first book, and made it even larger with subsequent releases. If you look at the statistics of it, it might look as if she took advantage of her readers by making them financially poorer by the cost of books they bought. Obviously, the stats have no concern of non-monetary value exchanged here, and proclaim wealth inequality instead.
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    This book analogy doesn't make sense to me
    - thissuchness 5y ago
btbuildem 5y ago
I'll go along with your point. Demographics of the US skew heavily towards the old. If your hypothesis were true, you'd expect to see the wealth distributed roughly with age.
- chmod600 5y ago
  What hypothesis? The article here doesn't control for some very important factors. I refuse to be outraged until I see numbers corrected for non-outragous factors, like mobility.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
I think you're confusing "income" for "wealth". The wealthiest people are the people with the most assets. You don't pop into the top 10% just by selling a house. That doesn't affect your wealth at all. The wealthiest do tend to be older because they've accrued wealth over a lifetime, but it's definitely not true that if you're old, you're wealthy. Wealth is not income, and neither are class.
- chmod600 5y ago
  You're right that the "ebb and flow" on wealth is much less of a factor than on income, and that I conflated those two. But not controlling for age is still a major omission. A lot of middle class people are in the top 10% as they near retirement because they've been saving throughout their life. How many? The article doesn't say.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    I don't think I agree. The article is not making generalizations about the wealthy. It's about the top 10% wealthiest and stating they own 90% of stocks. If you wanted age normalized wealth, the top 10% would probably be a lot of rich kids whose peers have negative net worth. I'm sure that's an interesting cut, but it's a different topic.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ska 5y ago
    This does not seem to be true, at least by any numbers I could quickly find. Seems like median net worth for retired folks is under $250k, net worth for 90th percentile folks is 1.25mm. If you restrict to 65-69 age group, the median only shifts to about 270k, 90th percentile is a little under 2mm. To get to 1mm net worth at that age group, you have to go up to about the 80 percentile. It seems you are correct that the 90 percentile shifts a fair bit at retirement age (65-69 is peak net worth) but it doesn't effect the middle very much, and you have to be > 20% to catch that 1.25mm number at any age group.
beckman466 5y ago
> it's not comparing Americans of different classes. It's comparing Americans at different stages of life. Or just the ebb and flow of income over and individual's life no, what we should really measure is property, ownership. the richest people pay little to no income. many years ago, before i learned about today's economic system, i remember being impressed upon hearing that Steve Jobs only took a $1 salary. now i know this is just incredibly beneficial tax-wise (along with a bunch of other tricks that aren't available to the non-propertied class). seriously all this talk about 'measuring income' or whatever is just a distraction from the underlying property systems and relations in our current system. "In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it. This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities. It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage. None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles." https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
dragonwriter 5y ago
While there is a correlation of net worth and age, there is no age band [0] where the median net worth is even 2/3 of the 75th percentile population net worth. [1] Age is not a major explanatory factor in wealth inequality. (The fact that the mean income in the 35-44 age range is much greater than the median income at the 65-74 age range, that has the highest median of any age range, also underlines this.) [0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-net-worth-by-age-in-america/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-net-worth-by-ag... [1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/

darth_avocado 5y ago

Am I the only one seeing a lot of headlines pitting top 10% against the rest? It’s disingenuous to make up headlines like this without mentioning too 10% consists of, you guessed it, top 1% which owns more than 50% of all the stocks.

dominotw 5y ago
oh yea i saw this recently too. here is one from last week that was making the rounds. "The problem with America’s semi-rich" https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-meritocracy-matthew-stewart https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-me...
thinkloop 5y ago
Top 1%? How disingenuous can you be, that's made up of the top 0.01% who own 30% of the top 1%'s wealth alone [1] [1] https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never-mind-1-percent-lets-talk-about-001-percent https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...
- darth_avocado 5y ago
  I agree. I just didn't have the stats to back me up when I wrote that. You are talking about wealth and not stocks, but you make the same point that I'm trying to make, which is that, top x% can be very misleading and clickbaity if you ignore the extreme inequality at the very top and can push the narrative in a direction that's not helpful. Thank you for bringing that up. I'd not be surprised it like 100 people in the country own 20% of all the stocks.
chmod600 5y ago
The top 10% is not a static category. People move in and out all the time as a result of ordinary life changes (rising income as you enter prime working years, selling assets to buy a house, selling a house, job loss, etc.). It doesn't really make sense to be mad at the 10%, because it will probably include you or others in your family unless you are really stuck. And there are a lot of people who are stuck. Let's not diminish that. But we will never address that if we are conflating them with young people who just happen to have a low income today but have every reason to see themselves in the middle class.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  > People move in and out all the time as a result of ordinary life changes (rising income as you enter prime working years, selling assets to buy a house, selling a house, job loss, etc.). The article refers to the top 10% wealthiest, everything you mentioned is related to income.
GoodJokes 5y ago
The thing is, the top 10% tend to vote with the top 1% and for the same reasons.

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

> Whenever I see stats like this that don't account for age, I ignore them. They are worthless. This, this, 100 times this. I wish I could upvote you 100 times. Yes, exactly that. I agree with you 100% on this.

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

Your complaint would have always applied to this stat. The fact that it is at an all-time record high signifies that something has changed.

chmod600 5y ago
The reaction then should be curiosity and a starting place for research, not the uninformed outrage that the article is peddling. Once you start looking at the numbers behind this, it's almost guaranteed that the real picture will be less outragous and suggest different policy prescriptions than whatever you might think looking at the headline. Or maybe you already know the details, and already know what we should do. But if so, you got your information from elsewhere, because the article doesn't offer much.

standardUser 5y ago

That's a myth. There's plenty of data on this. Most American never get anywhere close to the top 10% - not even remotely - regardless of age. The idea that everyone is just waiting around for their career to advance enough to put them in the upper-middle class is ludicrous on its face. Just as ludicrous as the myth that only high school kids work for minimum wage.

cscurmudgeon 5y ago
Data says what you are saying is false. US is high in social mobility. #27 and improving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
The top 10% are worth a ton, there’s not getting around that. But not slicing by age really does muddy things. The US median net worth for 65-74 is over a quarter million dollars. The median net worth for under 35 is $14k. That’s about a 20x difference! Anything that doesn’t split by age is nearly impossible to interpret. For reference the top 10% net worth splits at about $1.2M, so both of your points are important.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  yeah that largely accounts for the racial wealth gap as well (though not completely). As median age by race varies by over a decade.
- airza 5y ago
  Sure, but the reason for that isn’t that they simply haven’t lived long enough to accure wealth. Younger generational cohorts have less than their parents did at the same age.
  - daddylongstroke 5y ago
    I think this can also be split by class and background to provide further clarity. For example, every single one of my classmates (we were all lower income people) and myself are head and shoulders above where our parents were at our age or at about the save level with us facing significantly less work and stress to get here. I have a feeling middle-income and upper-income people have seen something different than us.

temp8964 5y ago

Yes. This same kind of error also applies to racial comparisons. A large component of racial disparate in income is caused by age gap. One would assume that different races have the same age distribution, but in reality it is not. The difference is huge, see: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common...

vmception 5y ago
That's the tip of the iceberg, a lot of privilege and inequality discussion marginalizes younger white people that would otherwise be interested in helping make society more egalitarian. At best, many people get a freedom from some distractions, but the term privilege does not convey that well, which is very counterproductive, so that chart could help a lot!
- twofornone 5y ago
  I think demonizing so called privilege is cultural suicide, because most of what "privilege" amounts to is parents caring for their children and passing on successful cultural values. You don't want to foster cultural movements that discourage this behavior if you want a functioning society.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Privilege isn't parents taking better care of their children, it's parents doing a better job at taking care of their children than others, and multiple other things.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      What, in your thinking, is the difference between "taking better care" and "doing a better job at taking care"? Or are you saying that the difference is "than others"? Isn't that kind of implied by "better"?

ricardoplouis 5y ago

That's a fair point assuming upward economic mobility in the U.S but statistically speaking it's more likely someone stays rich or stays poor than it is that they move upward into a different bracket entirely https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does-poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s... While it is true that much of the recent wealth in the U.S. is self-made and not entirely inherited. It's also true that a child born poor in this country is far more likely to stay as such than they are to become part of the top 10%. If we lived in an egalitarian society, then pointing out the wealth of the top 10% might be divisive, but considering that our current wealth inequality is worst than 1774 France, then I believe it's a fairly accurate picture being painted. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-income-inequality-its-worse-today-than-it-was-in-1774/262537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/us-inco...

ghostwriter 5y ago
> It's also true that a child born poor in this country is far more likely to stay as such than they are to become part of the top 10%. how many of them get to the top 20%, how many more get to the top 30%? in other words, there's no need to be the best basketball player to succeed in life. > but considering that our current wealth inequality is worst than 1774 France, then I believe it's a fairly accurate picture being painted. wealth inequality is a meaningless measure, as J. K. Rowling increased it the moment she published her first book, and made it even larger with subsequent releases. If you look at the statistics of it, it might look as if she took advantage of her readers by making them financially poorer by the cost of books they bought. Obviously, the stats have no concern of non-monetary value exchanged here, and proclaim wealth inequality instead.
- diordiderot 5y ago
  This book analogy doesn't make sense to me
  - thissuchness 5y ago

btbuildem 5y ago

I'll go along with your point. Demographics of the US skew heavily towards the old. If your hypothesis were true, you'd expect to see the wealth distributed roughly with age.

chmod600 5y ago
What hypothesis? The article here doesn't control for some very important factors. I refuse to be outraged until I see numbers corrected for non-outragous factors, like mobility.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

I think you're confusing "income" for "wealth". The wealthiest people are the people with the most assets. You don't pop into the top 10% just by selling a house. That doesn't affect your wealth at all. The wealthiest do tend to be older because they've accrued wealth over a lifetime, but it's definitely not true that if you're old, you're wealthy. Wealth is not income, and neither are class.

chmod600 5y ago
You're right that the "ebb and flow" on wealth is much less of a factor than on income, and that I conflated those two. But not controlling for age is still a major omission. A lot of middle class people are in the top 10% as they near retirement because they've been saving throughout their life. How many? The article doesn't say.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I don't think I agree. The article is not making generalizations about the wealthy. It's about the top 10% wealthiest and stating they own 90% of stocks. If you wanted age normalized wealth, the top 10% would probably be a lot of rich kids whose peers have negative net worth. I'm sure that's an interesting cut, but it's a different topic.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ska 5y ago
  This does not seem to be true, at least by any numbers I could quickly find. Seems like median net worth for retired folks is under $250k, net worth for 90th percentile folks is 1.25mm. If you restrict to 65-69 age group, the median only shifts to about 270k, 90th percentile is a little under 2mm. To get to 1mm net worth at that age group, you have to go up to about the 80 percentile. It seems you are correct that the 90 percentile shifts a fair bit at retirement age (65-69 is peak net worth) but it doesn't effect the middle very much, and you have to be > 20% to catch that 1.25mm number at any age group.

beckman466 5y ago

> it's not comparing Americans of different classes. It's comparing Americans at different stages of life. Or just the ebb and flow of income over and individual's life no, what we should really measure is property, ownership. the richest people pay little to no income. many years ago, before i learned about today's economic system, i remember being impressed upon hearing that Steve Jobs only took a $1 salary. now i know this is just incredibly beneficial tax-wise (along with a bunch of other tricks that aren't available to the non-propertied class). seriously all this talk about 'measuring income' or whatever is just a distraction from the underlying property systems and relations in our current system. "In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it. This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities. It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage. None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles." https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

dragonwriter 5y ago

While there is a correlation of net worth and age, there is no age band [0] where the median net worth is even 2/3 of the 75th percentile population net worth. [1] Age is not a major explanatory factor in wealth inequality. (The fact that the mean income in the 35-44 age range is much greater than the median income at the 65-74 age range, that has the highest median of any age range, also underlines this.) [0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-net-worth-by-age-in-america/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-net-worth-by-ag... [1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/ https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-net-worth-percentiles/