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"Increasing inequality leads not only to the growth of top fortunes; it also results in greater numbers of wealth-holders. The “1 percent” becomes “2 percent.”

• delluminatus 13y ago
  Well, sure. If you think about inequality in terms of variance from the mean income, an increase in the size of the very wealthy class (an "outlier class") increases the variance in the same way that an increase in the size of the extremely poor class (another, less extreme "outlier class") does.
• scarmig 13y ago
  I had trouble parsing that statement as well. I think at heart it comes down to how inequality is a very slippery if not vacuous concept, but here's the most plausible explanatory mental model I could come up with: Let's define the elite as people who have, say, 10 times the income/wealth/power as the median person. As inequality increases, the cutoff point for people who have 10x what the median person has decreases from 99th percentile to 98th percentile (or whatever). This is workable numerically if you think of income as falling along a Pareto distribution. I'm not sure it's workable as a definition of the elite, though: why would the 98th percentile have more access to power with more inequality? Although they outstrip the median fine, they'd be even further away from the 99th or 99.9th percentile.
• a3n 13y ago
  It could be because there is a disappearing middle, with little gradation between super rich and fucked.