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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 ever

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.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      At that point, there’s a reversion to the mean too. If your parents got lucky, you probably won’t be as lucky. If your parents got unlucky, you probably won’t be as unlucky. And luck aside, you’re still going to be (on average) closer to average than your parents.
- snarf21 5y ago
  No, you would also need to slice by top net worth percentage inside of each age group. You need to compare the percentage of people in each percentile because average/median are going to obscure the disparity. I'd bet that half the people under 35 have a negative net worth.
- midasuni 5y ago
  Can the median 30 year old grow their net worth by $500 a month plus inflation over the next 3 decades? People with stocks have undergone a massive boom in the last 20 years, that boom is not sustainable.
  - pbak 5y ago
    > People with stocks have undergone a massive boom in the last 20 years, that boom is not sustainable. Bubble goes pop!
- burnafter182 5y ago
  So you've seen the wealth gap graphic, where they slice it up into deciles? Further into percentages? It's wrong, it doesn't account for debt. There should be a huge mass of people that are net negative. I think we're really presented with all the wrong information. First we need to break down into a heat map of CoL which can act as an approximation of demand for the given region. Then we need to look at individual median (perhaps modal) cash flow, where your deciles land, and whether that's translating into profit when you calculate in inflationary pressures. Then you've got to look at average degrees of freedom given demographics like no-diploma, GED/equivalent, HS-diploma, and degree strata that indicate an upward move in purely economic terms. I think what you'd find is the vast majority of people are just on the treadmill, and will for the foreseeable future there remain. I expect the median net worth (what's the method?) of a 35 year old is very much in the negative space. And I'd hope over a lifetime that the 65-74 cohort is breakeven - which is about what you've indicated - Zillow indicates the average value of a house is $264k. To some extent this is how our system is designed to work, but the system itself is predicated on a slew of fallacious logic and wholly removed from any semblance of morality while dually being totally unaccountable for the destruction and extraction of value that it is founded on. I should also add that power as a function of wealth had ought to be looked at. What is the effective cost of having a voice in policy? I suspect it's in the highest echelons of net worth that you can even begin thinking about leveraging the system, and locally at that. At which point, corporate personhood might had ought to be considered, how does that deform our distribution?
  - hellisothers 5y ago
    Debt is at best a red herring, an individual with a $30k mortgage on a $60k home is not in the same situation as an individual with $30k in the bank and $30k of credit card debt yet they both have $30k in debt.
    - ska 5y ago
      > Debt is at best a red herring, That's really not what red herring means. The problem with debt is that is complicated, not that it doesn't matter.
zsmi 5y ago
Isn't this a truism though. If most Americans could get to the top 10% then it wouldn't be the top 10%.
- tda 5y ago
  most American have a fair chance at reaching the top 10% by age at some point in the future. not sure of the numbers but I would guess at least 50% of the population is expected to reach am age where 90% of the other people are younger
- divbzero 5y ago
  Not quite a truism. Given that wealth varies over each lifespan, you should expect somewhat more than 10% of Americans reach the top 10% at some age.
- simonh 5y ago
  Shock statistic, 50% of students have below average scores in math!
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  It's not a truism given that the original comment is implying that the wealth distribution discussed in the article title is a result of people having more wealth toward the end of their life. Theoretically the 10% of oldest Americans could be the wealthiest 10% as well, although this is certainly not actually the case.
- chmod600 5y ago
  People fall in and out of the categories all the time due to job loss or raises or selling a bunch of stock to make the down payment on a house. Some people are stuck in the lower quintiles, and some people "stuck" in the higher ones. Other people float around or jump due to life events.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    Selling stock to buy a house will lower their stock holdings, not their net worth.
chmod600 5y ago
Then perhaps you should be writing the article, not Robert Frank. As written, the article is worthless except as a way to generate uninformed outrage. If you have information to share, I have an open mind. I suspect it will be less outragous than the 10%/89% headline, though.
nostromo 5y ago
A large number of Americans will be in the top 10% by income at some point during their life. Edit: I looked it up, and it's actually a majority of Americans (57%) will be in the top 10% at least one year of their life. As noted, even just selling a house in a random state like Wisconsin can easily put you in that bucket. Top 10% by wealth is a different story harder to attain. It's frustrating that we pay for things with taxes on income and not wealth, because it hits the upper-middle-class harder than it hits the people with all of the equity. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-income-mobility-in-the-us-73-of-americans-were-in-the-top-20-for-at-least-a-year/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-in...
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >A large number of Americans will be in the top 10% by income at some point during their life. If, "by a large number," you mean 10%, then you're right. Edit: Upon reflection, my comment was both flip and inaccurate. In sum, I was talking out of my ass. Phew! That stinks. My bad.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    People rotate in and out of that 10%. 25 years ago I maybe had a net wealth of 500 bucks, 15 years ago I was negative 180k. Today I am in that 10%. By the time I get to 70 I probably will not be in that 10% anymore. Hell one 'RIFF' and 2-3 years of 'sorry you are not a good fit', medium sized illness, and I could be there again.
  - nostromo 5y ago
    Absolutely not. 10% would be the bare minimum, by definition.
  - mod 5y ago
    People die, people's incomes change (or cease). More than 10% of the population will be in the top 10% of almost any category at some point during their lifespan, even if it's briefly.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
bko 5y ago
> Some 11% of Americans will join the Top 1% for at least one year during their prime working lives (age 25 to 60), according to research done by Thomas Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University. But only 5.8% will be in it for two years or more. > The same holds true for those lower on the income ladder. While just over half of Americans reach the Top 10% at least once in their careers, only 14% stay in it for a decade or more, Hirschl found. (The minimum income threshold for the Top 10% was $141,000.) https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.ht...
rsj_hn 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. OK, let's take a look, because the GP was arguing about income mobility across different years of a person's life - intra-generational mobility -- not earnings compared to your parents -- inter-generational mobility. That distinction was the key point made. And the GP is basically correct: From two studies about intragenerational bottom[1] and top[2] income mobility: * 53.1 percent will have experienced at least one year within the top 10th percentile * 36.4 percent will have encountered one year within the top 5th percentile * 11.1 percent will have experienced one year within the top 1st percentile. * 70% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the top quintile * 61% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the bottom quintile. * 42% of Americans experience at least one year in the bottom decile Summarizing: "Taken together, these findings indicate that across the American life course there is a large amount of income volatility. Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. This finding provides an interesting and important caveat to the overall story of rising levels of income inequality across the past 40 years." [2] Note that a key issue when studying mobility is that you need to do it across a few business cycles. If your study is only during an economic expansion, then it's not going to be meaningful, as life changes tend to clustered around contractions and recoveries, and several such episodes are needed. Thus the studies I selected cover 44 year periods. Some of the studies are for 5-10 year periods, and that's really too small. --- [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271598246_The_Life_Course_Dynamics_of_Affluence https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271598246_The_Life_... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133513 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- ska 5y ago
  > Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. That's not what class means.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > From two studies about intragenerational bottom and top income mobility Irrelevant because the subject here is wealth not income. Year-to-year income variation doesn't imply the same degree (relative to median) wealth variation.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I completely disagree. I'm in my middle 50s. I have friends who have lived below their means all their lives and invested in wisely-- almost all of these people have sizeable savings now. I also have friends of my age who did not live below means. They spent what they had and invested almost nothing. Predictably, they have nothing to show. The system works. It's been foretold in investing books for decades. Today, we have resources like Bogleheads, Mr. Money Mustache, Dave Ramsey, etc. they all preach the same message, and the message is overwhelmingly truthful. Accumulating wealth is relatively certain, if you follow the process. There will be rare exceptions, but that's true of most everything.

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.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    At that point, there’s a reversion to the mean too. If your parents got lucky, you probably won’t be as lucky. If your parents got unlucky, you probably won’t be as unlucky. And luck aside, you’re still going to be (on average) closer to average than your parents.
snarf21 5y ago
No, you would also need to slice by top net worth percentage inside of each age group. You need to compare the percentage of people in each percentile because average/median are going to obscure the disparity. I'd bet that half the people under 35 have a negative net worth.
midasuni 5y ago
Can the median 30 year old grow their net worth by $500 a month plus inflation over the next 3 decades? People with stocks have undergone a massive boom in the last 20 years, that boom is not sustainable.
- pbak 5y ago
  > People with stocks have undergone a massive boom in the last 20 years, that boom is not sustainable. Bubble goes pop!
burnafter182 5y ago
So you've seen the wealth gap graphic, where they slice it up into deciles? Further into percentages? It's wrong, it doesn't account for debt. There should be a huge mass of people that are net negative. I think we're really presented with all the wrong information. First we need to break down into a heat map of CoL which can act as an approximation of demand for the given region. Then we need to look at individual median (perhaps modal) cash flow, where your deciles land, and whether that's translating into profit when you calculate in inflationary pressures. Then you've got to look at average degrees of freedom given demographics like no-diploma, GED/equivalent, HS-diploma, and degree strata that indicate an upward move in purely economic terms. I think what you'd find is the vast majority of people are just on the treadmill, and will for the foreseeable future there remain. I expect the median net worth (what's the method?) of a 35 year old is very much in the negative space. And I'd hope over a lifetime that the 65-74 cohort is breakeven - which is about what you've indicated - Zillow indicates the average value of a house is $264k. To some extent this is how our system is designed to work, but the system itself is predicated on a slew of fallacious logic and wholly removed from any semblance of morality while dually being totally unaccountable for the destruction and extraction of value that it is founded on. I should also add that power as a function of wealth had ought to be looked at. What is the effective cost of having a voice in policy? I suspect it's in the highest echelons of net worth that you can even begin thinking about leveraging the system, and locally at that. At which point, corporate personhood might had ought to be considered, how does that deform our distribution?
- hellisothers 5y ago
  Debt is at best a red herring, an individual with a $30k mortgage on a $60k home is not in the same situation as an individual with $30k in the bank and $30k of credit card debt yet they both have $30k in debt.
  - ska 5y ago
    > Debt is at best a red herring, That's really not what red herring means. The problem with debt is that is complicated, not that it doesn't matter.

zsmi 5y ago

Isn't this a truism though. If most Americans could get to the top 10% then it wouldn't be the top 10%.

tda 5y ago
most American have a fair chance at reaching the top 10% by age at some point in the future. not sure of the numbers but I would guess at least 50% of the population is expected to reach am age where 90% of the other people are younger
divbzero 5y ago
Not quite a truism. Given that wealth varies over each lifespan, you should expect somewhat more than 10% of Americans reach the top 10% at some age.
simonh 5y ago
Shock statistic, 50% of students have below average scores in math!
resoluteteeth 5y ago
It's not a truism given that the original comment is implying that the wealth distribution discussed in the article title is a result of people having more wealth toward the end of their life. Theoretically the 10% of oldest Americans could be the wealthiest 10% as well, although this is certainly not actually the case.
chmod600 5y ago
People fall in and out of the categories all the time due to job loss or raises or selling a bunch of stock to make the down payment on a house. Some people are stuck in the lower quintiles, and some people "stuck" in the higher ones. Other people float around or jump due to life events.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Selling stock to buy a house will lower their stock holdings, not their net worth.

chmod600 5y ago

Then perhaps you should be writing the article, not Robert Frank. As written, the article is worthless except as a way to generate uninformed outrage. If you have information to share, I have an open mind. I suspect it will be less outragous than the 10%/89% headline, though.

nostromo 5y ago

A large number of Americans will be in the top 10% by income at some point during their life. Edit: I looked it up, and it's actually a majority of Americans (57%) will be in the top 10% at least one year of their life. As noted, even just selling a house in a random state like Wisconsin can easily put you in that bucket. Top 10% by wealth is a different story harder to attain. It's frustrating that we pay for things with taxes on income and not wealth, because it hits the upper-middle-class harder than it hits the people with all of the equity. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-income-mobility-in-the-us-73-of-americans-were-in-the-top-20-for-at-least-a-year/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-in...

nobody9999 5y ago
>A large number of Americans will be in the top 10% by income at some point during their life. If, "by a large number," you mean 10%, then you're right. Edit: Upon reflection, my comment was both flip and inaccurate. In sum, I was talking out of my ass. Phew! That stinks. My bad.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  People rotate in and out of that 10%. 25 years ago I maybe had a net wealth of 500 bucks, 15 years ago I was negative 180k. Today I am in that 10%. By the time I get to 70 I probably will not be in that 10% anymore. Hell one 'RIFF' and 2-3 years of 'sorry you are not a good fit', medium sized illness, and I could be there again.
- nostromo 5y ago
  Absolutely not. 10% would be the bare minimum, by definition.
- mod 5y ago
  People die, people's incomes change (or cease). More than 10% of the population will be in the top 10% of almost any category at some point during their lifespan, even if it's briefly.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago

bko 5y ago

> Some 11% of Americans will join the Top 1% for at least one year during their prime working lives (age 25 to 60), according to research done by Thomas Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University. But only 5.8% will be in it for two years or more. > The same holds true for those lower on the income ladder. While just over half of Americans reach the Top 10% at least once in their careers, only 14% stay in it for a decade or more, Hirschl found. (The minimum income threshold for the Top 10% was $141,000.) https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.ht...

rsj_hn 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. OK, let's take a look, because the GP was arguing about income mobility across different years of a person's life - intra-generational mobility -- not earnings compared to your parents -- inter-generational mobility. That distinction was the key point made. And the GP is basically correct: From two studies about intragenerational bottom[1] and top[2] income mobility: * 53.1 percent will have experienced at least one year within the top 10th percentile * 36.4 percent will have encountered one year within the top 5th percentile * 11.1 percent will have experienced one year within the top 1st percentile. * 70% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the top quintile * 61% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the bottom quintile. * 42% of Americans experience at least one year in the bottom decile Summarizing: "Taken together, these findings indicate that across the American life course there is a large amount of income volatility. Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. This finding provides an interesting and important caveat to the overall story of rising levels of income inequality across the past 40 years." [2] Note that a key issue when studying mobility is that you need to do it across a few business cycles. If your study is only during an economic expansion, then it's not going to be meaningful, as life changes tend to clustered around contractions and recoveries, and several such episodes are needed. Thus the studies I selected cover 44 year periods. Some of the studies are for 5-10 year periods, and that's really too small. --- [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271598246_The_Life_Course_Dynamics_of_Affluence https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271598246_The_Life_... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133513 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

ska 5y ago
> Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. That's not what class means.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> From two studies about intragenerational bottom and top income mobility Irrelevant because the subject here is wealth not income. Year-to-year income variation doesn't imply the same degree (relative to median) wealth variation.

RickJWagner 5y ago

I completely disagree. I'm in my middle 50s. I have friends who have lived below their means all their lives and invested in wisely-- almost all of these people have sizeable savings now. I also have friends of my age who did not live below means. They spent what they had and invested almost nothing. Predictably, they have nothing to show. The system works. It's been foretold in investing books for decades. Today, we have resources like Bogleheads, Mr. Money Mustache, Dave Ramsey, etc. they all preach the same message, and the message is overwhelmingly truthful. Accumulating wealth is relatively certain, if you follow the process. There will be rare exceptions, but that's true of most everything.