20 ms·

To grasp the extent of inequality, look at the relatively well-off

96 points by ksey3 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Retry, it’s intermittent
politelemon 3y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20230722123225/https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/to-grasp-the-extent-of-inequality-look-at-the-relatively-well-off/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230722123225/https://blogs.lse....
- politelemon 3y ago
  I saw some slightly different stats compared to what was on the page above. On the 'This Is Money' site they have a breakdown by whether you have children or not, and which percentile that places you in. I thought that was a pretty good way of putting it, because disposable income makes a pretty big difference in your lifestyle doesn't it? Anyway I've tried copy pasting the table and made a brave effort at formatting it here. Percentile Single Individual Couple with no children Couple with two children under 14 10th £9,800 £14,600 £20,500 50th £19,700 £29,500 £41,300 90th £38,400 £57,400 £80,300 97th £59,700 £89,100 £124,700 https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-11894303/Where-does-income-Britains-earners.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-11894303/W...
simbolit 3y ago
Three years ago, Tom Scott made a road trip visualization of a billion dollars: https://piped.video/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg https://piped.video/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg Around the same time this rice visualization went viral: https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw
- politelemon 3y ago
  In the second video he mentions the rice isn't going to be wasted, but I was pretty grossed out when he shoved that keyboard in there. Of course the rice will probably be washed but, totally blech.
- prepend 3y ago
  I would have just measured the rice with a scale. Counting it out is certainly more TikTok votes, but I have a scale to 3 significant digits and counting this one at a time seems like a waste. Comically, I think I could order the scale with four hour delivery and count by weight faster than this person counted one at a time.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    The whole point of doing it one at a time was to show the scale. Completing it quickly was not the goal
    - prepend 3y ago
      I think it was scale of the grains of rice. Not the scale of how long it takes to count to 10,000.
J_Shelby_J 3y ago
It’s like they read this and wrote a book on it. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
anovikov 3y ago
I'm sure it's simply because almost everyone lives off unreported, cash income. Let's be honest: 60K per year is poverty, it's picking between living in a place without roaches vs eating out in a crappy place once per week. UK is not a poor country. I know plenty of people earning around a median wage but no one who actually lives on that little. When you get median wage, or two, or three, you still need someone else to pay your bills. My employees get 2-4x median wages and they do NOT live on that money alone (almost all of them moonlight elsewhere), and they are almost all struggling. I am far in top 1% and when i saw what is the asking rent now i said to myself - "wow if i had to move now, that'll be a predicament". Ask any landlord if they are getting paid through the bank. Many won't even accept bank payment. They are paid in cash - and that cash hasn't been in the bank since many circulation loops ago. People are not poor. They are buying everything like crazy, economy is running so hot it can blow up any moment. They just don't report the money they make.
- pastage 3y ago
  Sarcasm? 60k GBP per year is what an IT director get in the UK, that can not be poverty.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    This (original comment, not parent) is what happens when you conflate London and the Home Counties with the UK as a whole.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >UK is not a poor country. Pretty much yeah. Yes, it's having challenges due to de-industrialization and Brexit, but it's still one of the best job markets in Europe. Alarmist articles make it sound like the UK is Africa or something.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There are two income households. Also, I live in the US not the UK, but I'd question whether most people in the median income range and certainly as you rise materially above that not only have significant non-salary money coming in but it's of a nature that isn't reported.
gizmo 3y ago
I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights? This is their thesis: > The focus of this book is on the larger group between the 1% and the 10%. These are the managers and professionals of our media, business, the third sector, political parties and academia and are just as influential. However, many would not recognise themselves as high earners at all. In fact, earning around £60,000 a year in Britain places you in the top 10% of income earners. Maybe you’re surprised you fall into this category, or are not as far off as you thought. But despite this group’s relative advantage and comfort, these high earners don’t feel politically empowered. They worry about their income and are anxious about the future. Uh, yes? Aren't these just trite observations? Professionals who earn somewhat higher than average salaries live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars and go on nicer holidays but they are still stuck working for a paycheck like almost everybody else. I get the impression the authors badly wanted to write a book about about income inequality, a subject they feel strongly about, and then tried (and failed) to come up with something fresh to say. The meta point here is that academia has become fiercely competitive and that's why you see books like these getting written. CV padding by people desperate for tenure. I sympathize, but also wonder if we need yet another book rehashing arguments about wealth and income inequality.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights? Why do there have to be new insights? Inequality has been a persistent problem, and it's only been getting worse. The problem needs to be consistently highlighted, not tossed under the rug. It's like global warming. Researchers have known about it for a long time, and there are no "new insights" except that it continues to exist and is getting worse.
  - rhaway84773 3y ago
    Especially when a legitimate criticism against the news media is that they are usually only after “new” stuff, and don’t spend enough time following up on ongoing issues.
- goodpoint 3y ago
zorrotorro 3y ago
The relatively well off can't even keep a server online. Silly article. It's basically claiming that since even the relatively well off are not doing so great nowadays due to inflation, etc. they may appreciate some wealth redistribution (to those even poorer) because they now understand inequality. (The article authors also imply inequality will lead to a revolt, aka. the stick). Yeah, sure! You can bet the relatively well off which are feeling the economic heat will just love to pay more taxes and plunge even more rapidly on the economic ladder.
- harimau777 3y ago
  Couldn't a policymaker retain the support of the relatively well off by only raising taxes on the very well off?
- wonderwonder 3y ago
  It is kind of a strange argument that the author tacked on at the end. No body is doing well these days, even people with relatively good incomes are struggling. You know what would help those struggling people? Higher taxes! It was a really strange transition and kind of torpedoed the entire article.
sunsunsunsun 3y ago
I feel this big time. I'm in the top 10% of income earners in Canada and yet me and my family are stuck in a small one bed apartment. We can't buy property as everything in the area would leave us very house poor, if we even qualify for the mortgage.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I'm in the same boat and was so confused until I did the math what my lower middle class parents made adjusted for inflation and they had more real purchasing power than me.
  - getmeinrn 3y ago
    "Inflation’s silver lining: higher salaries" [1] But you're making a bigger number, so it's fine! Don't mind those that own everything unofficially taxing those that own nothing with inflation. 1. https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1413132513350803460 https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1413132513350803460
  - balderdash 3y ago
    Yeah I think the the number that clicked for me was the ratio of home price to entry level wage 50 years ago. E.g. an entry level job on Wall Street might have paid $15k/yr and a really nice apartment was $150k…a 10x spread - today that entry level job is say $150K but the same apartment is like $3-5m closer to a 25x spread…
- tjpnz 3y ago
  You're probably not in the top 10% when you account for the wealthy hiding their assets from the tax man.
  - speakfreely 3y ago
    No one who is wealthy would ever refer to their annual income as a defining metric.
- pydry 3y ago
goodluckchuck 3y ago
[flagged]
- munchler 3y ago
  What? No. No one wants to fare poorly on an objective measure like health, education, or income.
  - goodluckchuck 3y ago
    I’m not saying anyone wants to fare poorly, but that it’s very hard to create a strong economy where it’s also impossible to fare poorly. There is always risk. Either the system is designed such that the risk can be individualized and failure can be individualized. Or risk will be communal and economic failures will be necessarily systemic. I don’t want to ever be homeless, but I’d much rather it happen to me than everyone. No one escapes a Great Depression.
- Timon3 3y ago
  I'm sure this sounded clever when you wrote it, but can you actually explain it? Are you really just trying to say "curious, you want diversity, yet you don't want people to be poor"?
  - goodluckchuck 3y ago
    It’s so intuitive to me that it’s hard to explain why economic diversity is a sign of a healthy economic system. The best I can do is give examples. I’ve been to Disney World, and it was very fun and nice, and there were no homeless people asking me for money, and it was clean, and the windows weren’t broken… but it was also obvious that it wasn’t a healthy economy. I was paying an unsustainable price for that, those who couldn’t afford it were excluded, etc. I’ve also been to somewhere in south america and (where I was) it was largely the opposite. There were people aggressively selling / begging, everything was dirty, buildings were in disrepair. This also wasn’t healthy. Everyone I saw was poor. That wasn’t diverse either. Parts of Europe were largely a toned-down Disney World. There were nice areas with a fair degree of economic diversity and an absence of the very worst poverty… but then there were places I was cautioned to not go, places were the symptoms of an unhealthy economy existed and were hidden from public view. It was still fairly healthy. There was a lot of diversity. I saw a couple supercars, a bunch of neat European beaters, and a fair number of cars that I’d say were fairly average in the US but were clearly fairly to do. Meanwhile theres virtually nowhere in the US that I cannot freely go in relative safety. I routinely see people from every walk of life… and the US is the strongest economy in the world. Eliminating the diversity may be good for some people individually, but it’d hurt the whole. Of course I’m not saying that it can’t be too extreme, but people pursing an utter absence of poverty or utter absence of extreme wealth don’t know what they’re talking about. Economic diversity helps. It means there are people with means, others with motivation, others with a mixture, etc. It creates a economic system where systemic needs are most likely to meet a person who can recognize and fulfill the role.
balderdash 3y ago
I always struggle with conversations around income percentile as the implicit assumption in most cases is that they are pretty static (I.e. that a person at the top, middle, bottom of the scale remains there consistently). The statistic I’d me more interested in is cumulative earnings adjusted for age + untaxed transfers/benefits (e.g. inheritance or public pension benefits).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bandrami 3y ago
What annoys me is that this becomes a simple accounting question. Inequality has only soared like this to the extent that we mark asset portfolios to market rather than to book. Somebody agrees to pay a bit more for a TSLA share and suddenly Musk's net worth has "increased" by a billion dollars, but he owns at the end of the day exactly what he owned at the start of the day. If we just marked assets to book instead (which makes some sense because there's no way most whales could actually liquidate their holdings at their current price) the world's inequality would plummet.
- balderdash 3y ago
  I think in the context of the article they are referring to income, so the unrealized portion of asset inflation is not taken into consideration
- CSSer 3y ago
  The thing is that they never have to liquidate. They’re given an outsized leverage because any bank will lend them money with the assets as collateral, and they never have to pay tax on that cash (unless you consider low interest given to a bank tax).
roenxi 3y ago
This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else. This may be a comforting thought to some people but it is also not a defensible position. It doesn't hold logically and as far as I recall all the major religions discourage thinking that way - likely because it leads to bad outcomes. Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work. We've seen how that plays out - the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues. The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is much harder to game and also fairer.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else. This is missing the point. It's not the "mere existence" of the ultra-wealthy, it's that the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society. For example: "while the top 10 per cent grew its share of total income by 7.6 per cent between 1980 and 2018 (from 28.5 per cent to 36.1 per cent), the top 1 per cent grew theirs by 6.3 per cent (from 6.8 per cent to 13.1 per cent), which leaves only 1.3 per cent of share growth for the rest of the top 10 per cent." > The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is the focus on the article. The point was that the top 10% are not necessarily raising their absolute living standards, because most of the income gains are going to the top 1%, inflation is rising, housing prices are rising, student loan debt is rising, existence in the top 10% is often only temporary and precarious (think layoffs and other economic trends), and as the article says, "The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status." Someone can easily fall out of the top 10%. It's a lot more difficult to fall out of the top 1% and back into the working class. Wealth begets wealth.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society What, do only the ultra-wealthy have smartphones? High level the big issue is overpopulation. At the pointy end of the stick we have the crusade against cheap energy. You can blame the outcomes on the ultra-wealthy looking after themselves, but fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting. Picking the ultra-wealthy as a bogyman isn't going to fix things. The ultra-wealthy don't have huge storehouses of food to feed the hungry. They don't have 10 years supply of cheap gas for everyone. They can't magic cheap goods out of the air without someone else working to build them.
nomaD_ 3y ago
Nothing new here. Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London. I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio. All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio. I doubt the big shots will let the housing market crash. The falling property prices are promoted as a negative in the media. In Germany they're already propping it up to keep it from crashing because big real estate firms demand they can't loose and their political pawns will comply. https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/struggling-german-property-firms-appeal-berlin-multi-billion-boost-2023-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/struggling-german-pro...
  - nomaD_ 3y ago
    I don't know. Last year I believed interest rates would never rise to a level that would cause stock market crash but it happened. It was faster in the US but BoE also reluctantly is raising & market now pricing in 6-6.5% terminal. Last year, I also believed Liz Truss would get away with 150B of energy subsidies by borrowing away. Because most politicians in the last decade have indeed got away with it. Rishi Sunak as FM spent 400B on furlough, covid loans and eat out to help out (idiotic idea imo). BUT, she didn't. These events have changed my beliefs. Math is never wrong, just that sometimes market is so complex and economy goes through cycles that it seems illogical but eventually, it will all even out.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Not sure I get what you're saying. Are you saying you think the property market will collapse soon?
roody15 3y ago
Inequality is off the charts in western civilization. There is a bigger wealth divide now then in the times of the robber Barons of oil and train. Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical. It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control. The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.
- balderdash 3y ago
  There is a correlation between income and wealth. But it’s far from perfect. When you factor in things like inheritance (e.g. inherit a median home in CA that’s fully paid off from your parents, that’s worth $600k - it takes a really long time earning $100k/yr to save that much!) there are lots of low to middle income earners that have more wealth than some higher income earners.
  - hiddencost 3y ago
    When you inherit $100M in property that comes with fairly large income streams. A $600k house barely registers in the wealth / inequality spectrum the parent is talking about.
    - balderdash 3y ago
      You’re missing my point - the imputed rent on a $600k home is like $4k/mo ($48k/year) or ~$60k pre tax. Who would you rather be someone making making $40k/yr with a $600k home free and clear, or someone making $80k/yr? You don’t need to talk about the super rich to see that the median California home dramatically changes the “income” distribution
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Wage income is nearly irrelevant in understanding wealth inequality. It's easy for the working class (which we are!) to see someone else working and making $10M a year and to think, wow, that's where inequality comes from! But that's a rounding error when it comes to wealth inequality. It's capital formation driving it. A wage income in the top 0.01% is extraordinarily well-off, but it would never put you in the top 0.01% of wealth.
awesomeMilou 3y ago
The points the article raises are completely moot. >Meanwhile, traditionally upper-middle class professions such as law, medicine and academia are threatened by automation, precarisation and increased competition in globalised labour markets. Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy. The New Zurich Newspaper had a very sobering article on how academia is loosing it's last edge, that of gatekeeping higher paid jobs in a globalized economy. A degree used to be an effective showstopper for upwards mobility, because not many could afford one. This might be europe specific, but conditions for undergrads from the middle class were abhorrent up until the mid 80s here in europe. The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo. > The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status. Because of the environment created by their parent generation. They're the ones pushing for ever more "professionalization" your honor! Where my parent's could have gone into the field I want to get into without a degree at my age, I have to graduate in order to attain any respect.
- nerdchum 3y ago
  Theres a billion kids from Shenzen though. They could literally do all the work in America. Then theres 1.5 billion people in India on top of that. Meanwhile, Western countries birth rates are declining. I dont know what the solution is but this is the argument for the destruction of western civilization. And maybe that would make a lot of people happy but I would not want to live in a world without things/ideas that Western civilization has created.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >Theres a billion kids from Shenzen though Shenzen =/= all of China
wonderwonder 3y ago
Pretty surprised at the difference in income in UK vs USA. Top 10% in UK according to this article is 59,200 pounds [~$76,000] while in the US to enter the top 10% you need to make ~$173k. This is a very large difference. While I know that the UK provides certain benefits related to health care above what the US does I cannot think this comes close to $100k per year. The average cost of a house in the US is ~436k [which is insane] and the average cost of a house in the UK is $372k which again is pretty expensive. Not really sure where I am going with this except to express surprise at what appears to be a massive wealth discrepancy between the US and what I had long considered its closest comparable economy. I had never really done the research though thus my surprise.
- rcarr 3y ago
  I wish we saw more comments like this. People in the US, particularly the Valley or those working at FAANG, don't seem to realise the extent to how good your salaries are in comparison to the rest of the Western World. If you want an English speaking country with income closest to US, you're better off looking at Australia. Total size of the economy is far smaller because the population is far smaller, but GDP per capita is far higher and the wealth is spread more evenly than the UK. To such an extent that the NHS is now worried because increasing amounts of medical staff are leaving the UK for Australia to get 2, 3 or even 4x salaries.
ncphil 3y ago
Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, cited in the article, remains a fundamental resource for understanding how we got here. It's really essential reading. Given all that, the solutions presented in his later books appear to be inevitable. As for whether we're in a new Gilded Age, I'd say the we're way past that: it's more like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh.
stared 3y ago
I just realized that the top 10% in the UK is what a software engineer earns in... Poland. Sometimes it is good to realize that those of us who work in tech are privileged.
johnea 3y ago
Amazing how low the "top 3%" is in the UK: £104,000 8-/ That wouldn't be in the top 10% in the US. Inequality is skyrocketing, and the "labour" party has become tory, not even "tory light"...
Ferret7446 3y ago
Please stop focusing on inequality. What matters is whether the quality of life for the most impoverished is increasing or decreasing. Consider: would you rather increase the standard of living of the poorest by 2x if it meant also increasing it for the richest by 100x (increasing inequality) or would you rather decrease the standard of living of the richest by 100x and also the poorest by 2x (decreasing inequality). A lot of discourse around inequality seriously proposes the latter (out of ignorance rather than malice).
- science4sail 3y ago
  A lot of life satisfaction is tied to positional goods: real estate, social status, political power, etc. For positional goods, relative wealth matters far more than absolute wealth. If you have a population whose happiness is culturally tied to the stereotypical "single-family house owner with a picket fence and 2.1 kids attending Ivy League schools" lifestyle, then your latter solution (where everyone gets poorer) might actually be preferable.
Incipient 3y ago
I don't think anyone doubts thy staggering inequality. But what do you do about it? Especially in America the rich are those in power, so they're not going to shift the needle against themselves.
amai 3y ago
Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we... The top unequal countries according to wealth Gini 2019: 1. Netherlands 2. Russia 3. Sweden 4. United States 5. Brazil 6. Ukraine 7. Thailand 8. Denmark 9. Philippines 10. Saudi Arabia
- amai 3y ago
  Ok, the numbers on this Wikipedia page seem to be BS. A better list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

96 points by ksey3 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dopidopHN 3y ago
Retry, it’s intermittent

politelemon 3y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230722123225/https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/to-grasp-the-extent-of-inequality-look-at-the-relatively-well-off/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230722123225/https://blogs.lse....

politelemon 3y ago
I saw some slightly different stats compared to what was on the page above. On the 'This Is Money' site they have a breakdown by whether you have children or not, and which percentile that places you in. I thought that was a pretty good way of putting it, because disposable income makes a pretty big difference in your lifestyle doesn't it? Anyway I've tried copy pasting the table and made a brave effort at formatting it here. Percentile Single Individual Couple with no children Couple with two children under 14 10th £9,800 £14,600 £20,500 50th £19,700 £29,500 £41,300 90th £38,400 £57,400 £80,300 97th £59,700 £89,100 £124,700 https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-11894303/Where-does-income-Britains-earners.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-11894303/W...

simbolit 3y ago

Three years ago, Tom Scott made a road trip visualization of a billion dollars: https://piped.video/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg https://piped.video/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg Around the same time this rice visualization went viral: https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw

politelemon 3y ago
In the second video he mentions the rice isn't going to be wasted, but I was pretty grossed out when he shoved that keyboard in there. Of course the rice will probably be washed but, totally blech.
prepend 3y ago
I would have just measured the rice with a scale. Counting it out is certainly more TikTok votes, but I have a scale to 3 significant digits and counting this one at a time seems like a waste. Comically, I think I could order the scale with four hour delivery and count by weight faster than this person counted one at a time.
- hiatus 3y ago
  The whole point of doing it one at a time was to show the scale. Completing it quickly was not the goal
  - prepend 3y ago
    I think it was scale of the grains of rice. Not the scale of how long it takes to count to 10,000.

J_Shelby_J 3y ago

It’s like they read this and wrote a book on it. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

anovikov 3y ago

I'm sure it's simply because almost everyone lives off unreported, cash income. Let's be honest: 60K per year is poverty, it's picking between living in a place without roaches vs eating out in a crappy place once per week. UK is not a poor country. I know plenty of people earning around a median wage but no one who actually lives on that little. When you get median wage, or two, or three, you still need someone else to pay your bills. My employees get 2-4x median wages and they do NOT live on that money alone (almost all of them moonlight elsewhere), and they are almost all struggling. I am far in top 1% and when i saw what is the asking rent now i said to myself - "wow if i had to move now, that'll be a predicament". Ask any landlord if they are getting paid through the bank. Many won't even accept bank payment. They are paid in cash - and that cash hasn't been in the bank since many circulation loops ago. People are not poor. They are buying everything like crazy, economy is running so hot it can blow up any moment. They just don't report the money they make.

pastage 3y ago
Sarcasm? 60k GBP per year is what an IT director get in the UK, that can not be poverty.
- rcarr 3y ago
  This (original comment, not parent) is what happens when you conflate London and the Home Counties with the UK as a whole.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>UK is not a poor country. Pretty much yeah. Yes, it's having challenges due to de-industrialization and Brexit, but it's still one of the best job markets in Europe. Alarmist articles make it sound like the UK is Africa or something.
ghaff 3y ago
There are two income households. Also, I live in the US not the UK, but I'd question whether most people in the median income range and certainly as you rise materially above that not only have significant non-salary money coming in but it's of a nature that isn't reported.

gizmo 3y ago

I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights? This is their thesis: > The focus of this book is on the larger group between the 1% and the 10%. These are the managers and professionals of our media, business, the third sector, political parties and academia and are just as influential. However, many would not recognise themselves as high earners at all. In fact, earning around £60,000 a year in Britain places you in the top 10% of income earners. Maybe you’re surprised you fall into this category, or are not as far off as you thought. But despite this group’s relative advantage and comfort, these high earners don’t feel politically empowered. They worry about their income and are anxious about the future. Uh, yes? Aren't these just trite observations? Professionals who earn somewhat higher than average salaries live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars and go on nicer holidays but they are still stuck working for a paycheck like almost everybody else. I get the impression the authors badly wanted to write a book about about income inequality, a subject they feel strongly about, and then tried (and failed) to come up with something fresh to say. The meta point here is that academia has become fiercely competitive and that's why you see books like these getting written. CV padding by people desperate for tenure. I sympathize, but also wonder if we need yet another book rehashing arguments about wealth and income inequality.

lapcat 3y ago
> I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights? Why do there have to be new insights? Inequality has been a persistent problem, and it's only been getting worse. The problem needs to be consistently highlighted, not tossed under the rug. It's like global warming. Researchers have known about it for a long time, and there are no "new insights" except that it continues to exist and is getting worse.
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  Especially when a legitimate criticism against the news media is that they are usually only after “new” stuff, and don’t spend enough time following up on ongoing issues.
goodpoint 3y ago

zorrotorro 3y ago

The relatively well off can't even keep a server online. Silly article. It's basically claiming that since even the relatively well off are not doing so great nowadays due to inflation, etc. they may appreciate some wealth redistribution (to those even poorer) because they now understand inequality. (The article authors also imply inequality will lead to a revolt, aka. the stick). Yeah, sure! You can bet the relatively well off which are feeling the economic heat will just love to pay more taxes and plunge even more rapidly on the economic ladder.

harimau777 3y ago
Couldn't a policymaker retain the support of the relatively well off by only raising taxes on the very well off?
wonderwonder 3y ago
It is kind of a strange argument that the author tacked on at the end. No body is doing well these days, even people with relatively good incomes are struggling. You know what would help those struggling people? Higher taxes! It was a really strange transition and kind of torpedoed the entire article.

sunsunsunsun 3y ago

I feel this big time. I'm in the top 10% of income earners in Canada and yet me and my family are stuck in a small one bed apartment. We can't buy property as everything in the area would leave us very house poor, if we even qualify for the mortgage.

Spivak 3y ago
I'm in the same boat and was so confused until I did the math what my lower middle class parents made adjusted for inflation and they had more real purchasing power than me.
- getmeinrn 3y ago
  "Inflation’s silver lining: higher salaries" [1] But you're making a bigger number, so it's fine! Don't mind those that own everything unofficially taxing those that own nothing with inflation. 1. https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1413132513350803460 https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1413132513350803460
- balderdash 3y ago
  Yeah I think the the number that clicked for me was the ratio of home price to entry level wage 50 years ago. E.g. an entry level job on Wall Street might have paid $15k/yr and a really nice apartment was $150k…a 10x spread - today that entry level job is say $150K but the same apartment is like $3-5m closer to a 25x spread…
tjpnz 3y ago
You're probably not in the top 10% when you account for the wealthy hiding their assets from the tax man.
- speakfreely 3y ago
  No one who is wealthy would ever refer to their annual income as a defining metric.
pydry 3y ago

goodluckchuck 3y ago

[flagged]

munchler 3y ago
What? No. No one wants to fare poorly on an objective measure like health, education, or income.
- goodluckchuck 3y ago
  I’m not saying anyone wants to fare poorly, but that it’s very hard to create a strong economy where it’s also impossible to fare poorly. There is always risk. Either the system is designed such that the risk can be individualized and failure can be individualized. Or risk will be communal and economic failures will be necessarily systemic. I don’t want to ever be homeless, but I’d much rather it happen to me than everyone. No one escapes a Great Depression.
Timon3 3y ago
I'm sure this sounded clever when you wrote it, but can you actually explain it? Are you really just trying to say "curious, you want diversity, yet you don't want people to be poor"?
- goodluckchuck 3y ago
  It’s so intuitive to me that it’s hard to explain why economic diversity is a sign of a healthy economic system. The best I can do is give examples. I’ve been to Disney World, and it was very fun and nice, and there were no homeless people asking me for money, and it was clean, and the windows weren’t broken… but it was also obvious that it wasn’t a healthy economy. I was paying an unsustainable price for that, those who couldn’t afford it were excluded, etc. I’ve also been to somewhere in south america and (where I was) it was largely the opposite. There were people aggressively selling / begging, everything was dirty, buildings were in disrepair. This also wasn’t healthy. Everyone I saw was poor. That wasn’t diverse either. Parts of Europe were largely a toned-down Disney World. There were nice areas with a fair degree of economic diversity and an absence of the very worst poverty… but then there were places I was cautioned to not go, places were the symptoms of an unhealthy economy existed and were hidden from public view. It was still fairly healthy. There was a lot of diversity. I saw a couple supercars, a bunch of neat European beaters, and a fair number of cars that I’d say were fairly average in the US but were clearly fairly to do. Meanwhile theres virtually nowhere in the US that I cannot freely go in relative safety. I routinely see people from every walk of life… and the US is the strongest economy in the world. Eliminating the diversity may be good for some people individually, but it’d hurt the whole. Of course I’m not saying that it can’t be too extreme, but people pursing an utter absence of poverty or utter absence of extreme wealth don’t know what they’re talking about. Economic diversity helps. It means there are people with means, others with motivation, others with a mixture, etc. It creates a economic system where systemic needs are most likely to meet a person who can recognize and fulfill the role.

balderdash 3y ago

I always struggle with conversations around income percentile as the implicit assumption in most cases is that they are pretty static (I.e. that a person at the top, middle, bottom of the scale remains there consistently). The statistic I’d me more interested in is cumulative earnings adjusted for age + untaxed transfers/benefits (e.g. inheritance or public pension benefits).

deleted 3y ago
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bandrami 3y ago

What annoys me is that this becomes a simple accounting question. Inequality has only soared like this to the extent that we mark asset portfolios to market rather than to book. Somebody agrees to pay a bit more for a TSLA share and suddenly Musk's net worth has "increased" by a billion dollars, but he owns at the end of the day exactly what he owned at the start of the day. If we just marked assets to book instead (which makes some sense because there's no way most whales could actually liquidate their holdings at their current price) the world's inequality would plummet.

balderdash 3y ago
I think in the context of the article they are referring to income, so the unrealized portion of asset inflation is not taken into consideration
CSSer 3y ago
The thing is that they never have to liquidate. They’re given an outsized leverage because any bank will lend them money with the assets as collateral, and they never have to pay tax on that cash (unless you consider low interest given to a bank tax).

roenxi 3y ago

This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else. This may be a comforting thought to some people but it is also not a defensible position. It doesn't hold logically and as far as I recall all the major religions discourage thinking that way - likely because it leads to bad outcomes. Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work. We've seen how that plays out - the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues. The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is much harder to game and also fairer.

lapcat 3y ago
> This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else. This is missing the point. It's not the "mere existence" of the ultra-wealthy, it's that the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society. For example: "while the top 10 per cent grew its share of total income by 7.6 per cent between 1980 and 2018 (from 28.5 per cent to 36.1 per cent), the top 1 per cent grew theirs by 6.3 per cent (from 6.8 per cent to 13.1 per cent), which leaves only 1.3 per cent of share growth for the rest of the top 10 per cent." > The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is the focus on the article. The point was that the top 10% are not necessarily raising their absolute living standards, because most of the income gains are going to the top 1%, inflation is rising, housing prices are rising, student loan debt is rising, existence in the top 10% is often only temporary and precarious (think layoffs and other economic trends), and as the article says, "The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status." Someone can easily fall out of the top 10%. It's a lot more difficult to fall out of the top 1% and back into the working class. Wealth begets wealth.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society What, do only the ultra-wealthy have smartphones? High level the big issue is overpopulation. At the pointy end of the stick we have the crusade against cheap energy. You can blame the outcomes on the ultra-wealthy looking after themselves, but fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting. Picking the ultra-wealthy as a bogyman isn't going to fix things. The ultra-wealthy don't have huge storehouses of food to feed the hungry. They don't have 10 years supply of cheap gas for everyone. They can't magic cheap goods out of the air without someone else working to build them.

nomaD_ 3y ago

Nothing new here. Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London. I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio. All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio. I doubt the big shots will let the housing market crash. The falling property prices are promoted as a negative in the media. In Germany they're already propping it up to keep it from crashing because big real estate firms demand they can't loose and their political pawns will comply. https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/struggling-german-property-firms-appeal-berlin-multi-billion-boost-2023-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/struggling-german-pro...
- nomaD_ 3y ago
  I don't know. Last year I believed interest rates would never rise to a level that would cause stock market crash but it happened. It was faster in the US but BoE also reluctantly is raising & market now pricing in 6-6.5% terminal. Last year, I also believed Liz Truss would get away with 150B of energy subsidies by borrowing away. Because most politicians in the last decade have indeed got away with it. Rishi Sunak as FM spent 400B on furlough, covid loans and eat out to help out (idiotic idea imo). BUT, she didn't. These events have changed my beliefs. Math is never wrong, just that sometimes market is so complex and economy goes through cycles that it seems illogical but eventually, it will all even out.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Not sure I get what you're saying. Are you saying you think the property market will collapse soon?

roody15 3y ago

Inequality is off the charts in western civilization. There is a bigger wealth divide now then in the times of the robber Barons of oil and train. Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical. It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control. The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.

balderdash 3y ago
There is a correlation between income and wealth. But it’s far from perfect. When you factor in things like inheritance (e.g. inherit a median home in CA that’s fully paid off from your parents, that’s worth $600k - it takes a really long time earning $100k/yr to save that much!) there are lots of low to middle income earners that have more wealth than some higher income earners.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  When you inherit $100M in property that comes with fairly large income streams. A $600k house barely registers in the wealth / inequality spectrum the parent is talking about.
  - balderdash 3y ago
    You’re missing my point - the imputed rent on a $600k home is like $4k/mo ($48k/year) or ~$60k pre tax. Who would you rather be someone making making $40k/yr with a $600k home free and clear, or someone making $80k/yr? You don’t need to talk about the super rich to see that the median California home dramatically changes the “income” distribution
- scarmig 3y ago
  Wage income is nearly irrelevant in understanding wealth inequality. It's easy for the working class (which we are!) to see someone else working and making $10M a year and to think, wow, that's where inequality comes from! But that's a rounding error when it comes to wealth inequality. It's capital formation driving it. A wage income in the top 0.01% is extraordinarily well-off, but it would never put you in the top 0.01% of wealth.

awesomeMilou 3y ago

The points the article raises are completely moot. >Meanwhile, traditionally upper-middle class professions such as law, medicine and academia are threatened by automation, precarisation and increased competition in globalised labour markets. Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy. The New Zurich Newspaper had a very sobering article on how academia is loosing it's last edge, that of gatekeeping higher paid jobs in a globalized economy. A degree used to be an effective showstopper for upwards mobility, because not many could afford one. This might be europe specific, but conditions for undergrads from the middle class were abhorrent up until the mid 80s here in europe. The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo. > The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status. Because of the environment created by their parent generation. They're the ones pushing for ever more "professionalization" your honor! Where my parent's could have gone into the field I want to get into without a degree at my age, I have to graduate in order to attain any respect.

nerdchum 3y ago
Theres a billion kids from Shenzen though. They could literally do all the work in America. Then theres 1.5 billion people in India on top of that. Meanwhile, Western countries birth rates are declining. I dont know what the solution is but this is the argument for the destruction of western civilization. And maybe that would make a lot of people happy but I would not want to live in a world without things/ideas that Western civilization has created.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Theres a billion kids from Shenzen though Shenzen =/= all of China

wonderwonder 3y ago

Pretty surprised at the difference in income in UK vs USA. Top 10% in UK according to this article is 59,200 pounds [~$76,000] while in the US to enter the top 10% you need to make ~$173k. This is a very large difference. While I know that the UK provides certain benefits related to health care above what the US does I cannot think this comes close to $100k per year. The average cost of a house in the US is ~436k [which is insane] and the average cost of a house in the UK is $372k which again is pretty expensive. Not really sure where I am going with this except to express surprise at what appears to be a massive wealth discrepancy between the US and what I had long considered its closest comparable economy. I had never really done the research though thus my surprise.

rcarr 3y ago
I wish we saw more comments like this. People in the US, particularly the Valley or those working at FAANG, don't seem to realise the extent to how good your salaries are in comparison to the rest of the Western World. If you want an English speaking country with income closest to US, you're better off looking at Australia. Total size of the economy is far smaller because the population is far smaller, but GDP per capita is far higher and the wealth is spread more evenly than the UK. To such an extent that the NHS is now worried because increasing amounts of medical staff are leaving the UK for Australia to get 2, 3 or even 4x salaries.

ncphil 3y ago

Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, cited in the article, remains a fundamental resource for understanding how we got here. It's really essential reading. Given all that, the solutions presented in his later books appear to be inevitable. As for whether we're in a new Gilded Age, I'd say the we're way past that: it's more like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh.

stared 3y ago

I just realized that the top 10% in the UK is what a software engineer earns in... Poland. Sometimes it is good to realize that those of us who work in tech are privileged.

johnea 3y ago

Amazing how low the "top 3%" is in the UK: £104,000 8-/ That wouldn't be in the top 10% in the US. Inequality is skyrocketing, and the "labour" party has become tory, not even "tory light"...

Ferret7446 3y ago

Please stop focusing on inequality. What matters is whether the quality of life for the most impoverished is increasing or decreasing. Consider: would you rather increase the standard of living of the poorest by 2x if it meant also increasing it for the richest by 100x (increasing inequality) or would you rather decrease the standard of living of the richest by 100x and also the poorest by 2x (decreasing inequality). A lot of discourse around inequality seriously proposes the latter (out of ignorance rather than malice).

science4sail 3y ago
A lot of life satisfaction is tied to positional goods: real estate, social status, political power, etc. For positional goods, relative wealth matters far more than absolute wealth. If you have a population whose happiness is culturally tied to the stereotypical "single-family house owner with a picket fence and 2.1 kids attending Ivy League schools" lifestyle, then your latter solution (where everyone gets poorer) might actually be preferable.

Incipient 3y ago

I don't think anyone doubts thy staggering inequality. But what do you do about it? Especially in America the rich are those in power, so they're not going to shift the needle against themselves.

amai 3y ago

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we... The top unequal countries according to wealth Gini 2019: 1. Netherlands 2. Russia 3. Sweden 4. United States 5. Brazil 6. Ukraine 7. Thailand 8. Denmark 9. Philippines 10. Saudi Arabia

amai 3y ago
Ok, the numbers on this Wikipedia page seem to be BS. A better list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_per_adult#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...