
A Global Guide to What It Means to Be Part of the 1% - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/a-global-guide-to-what-it-means-to-be-part-of-the-1
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yasp
Compared to the 0.1% or, heaven forbid, the 0.01%, the 1% is downright poor.
Why the focus on the 1%?

Also, no focus on wealth inequality in this article, which is arguably much
more significant than income inequality.

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B-Con
"Occupy Wallstreet", which was largely composed of naive college students,
pushed the phrase "1%". It's catchy.

It's more like the 0.01% that most people _actually_ mean when they talk about
1%, including Occupy Wallstreet. The actual people at the 1% line are kind of
boring.

~~~
yasp
Except you end up getting equally naive journalists pushing equally naive
articles analyzing the 1%, and equally naive academics doing the same, and the
ultimate effect is that there's very little data and very little analysis on,
for example, the 0.01%. And people like Bernie Sanders, for example, seem
loathe to talk about them too. I imagine that people don't like to talk about
them because of how powerful they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is
actually a very useful smokescreen for the <0.01%.

~~~
B-Con
> I imagine that people don't like to talk about them because of how powerful
> they are. And so all this talk about the 1% is actually a very useful
> smokescreen for the <0.01%.

No joke. Who's the actual 1%? In my personal experience of friends and family:
My doctor, a VP of a big company you've never heard of, another doctor, a
higher-up at a corporate law firm, a business consultant, a very senior
engineer.

They don't run the world from the shadows. They don't hoard the world's
wealth. They pay cash for almost everything, some drive nice cars, and they
don't need to worry that their kid won't qualify for financial aid if they get
into an ivy league college. Half the ones I know started life either middle
class or in poverty.

Yeah, let's focus all our attention on them. I'm sure they have all the
answers to fixing the world's inequality.

