
Charts about Wealth Inequality in America - zt
http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
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habosa
Wow. Much of this I knew but one thing that shocked me is that the 10th
percentile of wealth in this country is a family with NEGATIVE $2000. If you
were dropped into Nebraska from a meteor with nothing in your pocket you
wouldn't even be in the bottom tenth.

A sad state of affairs for the "greatest country in the world".

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brianwawok
Want to do a survey of how many people in that bottom tenth have an iPhone?

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habosa
A $600 iPhone is probably one of the best investments you can make if you want
to participate in modern society.

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mywittyname
Agreed. And iPhones have been around for like a decade and over a billion of
them have been produced, so there are plenty of cheap used versions available.

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maxxxxx
The second chart is all you need to look at. It can't be healthy for a society
if only the top few percent see any income gains and for the rest incomes
stagnate.

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rbcgerard
I do t think these charts take into account benefits (I.e. Health insurance)
which means that for many people income has not grown, but total compensation
has grown, those workers just didn't get to choose where to spend it...

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pmiller2
In that case, think of that chart as representing "buying power," rather than
"income."

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cheald
That doesn't make sense, though, because if your buying power remains
stagnant, but you suddenly don't need to buy health insurance with that buying
power (because it's handled in the form of pre-takehome compensation), then
hasn't your net buying power increased?

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jaclaz
Side note, in graph 5 the middle one is the "Non-Hispanic African American"
category ...

... and have a look at the "data" underneath, a three line set of data with
two values coming from Melissa (link to another "local" .xlsx) and a third one
which is just a number.

Most probably correct calculations, but no real way to check.

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Aron
Probably the best bet here is to create mechanisms such that wealthy people
who possess an abundance of caring and money can donate that money to the less
fortunate, which would have the side effect of levelling the field, and the
bonus of not impinging on anyone's liberties.

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DarkKomunalec
Pretty sure they already can, but it's not enough, and you end up with a
society where the more selfish you are, the more money->power you have.

Tragedy of the commons is _not_ a new concept.

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thehardsphere
That's not a Tragedy of the Commons. Tragedy of the Commons is what happens
when nobody clearly owns something that many people use, so none of them use
it responsibly. That's not relevant at all to people hoarding their own
wealth.

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dragonwriter
> That's not a Tragedy of the Commons.

GPs example is exactly game-theoretix tragedy of the commons / prisoners
dilemma.

> Tragedy of the Commons is what happens when nobody clearly owns something
> that many people use, so none of them use it responsibly.

It's specifically, originally, a term for overgrazing a pastureland resulting
from the kind of arrangement you described; there are a number of
generalizations from that example which have been given the name, including
both the one you describe, and the even more general condition in which each
player has a dominant strategy of defection even though all players
cooperating has a better payoff than all defecting.

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thehardsphere
The fact that Tragedy of the Commons is a subset of game theory defection
problems does not change the fact that its defining requirement is the
existence of a "Commons."

The Commons need not be an overgrazed pastureland; it can be any open access
resource. The best modern example would be Earth's atmosphere and how its
being filled with pollution. GGP has not specified a Commons and the existence
of one is not implied in his comment.

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dragonwriter
> The fact that Tragedy of the Commons is a subset of game theory defection
> problems does not change the fact that its defining requirement is the
> existence of a "Commons."

The fact that the term has long been widely accepted as a label for the
general class of problems, OTOH, does.

(Arguably, the structure of the payoff matrix in the class of problems implies
an economically real if intangible “commons” in any problem in the class,
which is probably _why_ the label is used that way.)

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thehardsphere
Ok, what is the Commons he is talking about?

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Aron
Presumably the 'Commons' here is control over the government. However, the
example is a trivialization of reality and that matters, in the same way that
assuming all economic actors are rational matters (they aren't). It's fun when
we can use simple laws of nature to make predictions accurately.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work in the field of economics\politics almost ever.

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Camillo
Where are the Asians on these graphs?

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thehardsphere
Shush, you're going to ruin the scam for everyone else. ;)

