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> 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed. This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is d

> 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed. This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite? How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.

chimprich 3y ago
> This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed I didn't bring up the figure - I was just remarking on how I had a different reaction to it. And the remainder is also distributed in a non-diffuse manner. > If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are Do the majority of people have "a high quality of life"? I'm not sure that's true, but assuming it is true, then one issue is the massive power imbalance in terms of control over society: small numbers of people having huge influence over politics, the media, social tech companies etc. > Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold Which I was not doing. I'm not sure what would be the best distribution - but if I can't look at it quantitively, I think we can consider it qualitatively. Would we be in a better place if we moved towards more wealth inequality or less?