
The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy - noonespecial
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/?single_page=true
======
anbende
Some of the points about privilege might be accurate, but breaking economic
status in to .1%, 9.9%, and 90% is arbitrary and misleading. The author tries
to make the point that “the 9.9%” have the majority of the wealth and this
issue is as big or bigger than the concentration of wealth at the very top.
The problem is that this is largely an artifact of the division system. The
distribution is highly skewed, and the much of the wealth in the 9.9 is going
to actually be in that top .9.

In other words, the author just divides the top 1% into two pieces, and lumps
one of them in with “the 9.9”.

Edit: I did a little research and math. The top 1% holds 40% of US wealth. The
top 10% holds 77%. That’s 37% to “the 9%”. I would hypothesize that even
within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”,
i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.

~~~
jokoon
I disagree.

What the article is trying to point out is that the 9.9% thinks he's not so
wealthy, so he is against inequality, but he still, somehow, for his own
comfort and merit belief system, likes his higher income.

Trying to talk about ranges of income, would it the top N%, is pointless.

You could strip out the hypocrisy like so: "I am not at the top, so I am still
against inequality, but I am comfortable, but since I AM NOT AT THE TOP, YOU
CANNOT BLAME ME, so blame the richest". This is the core problem about
stretching inequality, because individualism makes people work for their own
selves, and NEVER encourage anyone to "take one for the team". The whole story
is about how people perceives their own selves. This is an important debate.

I'm sure those 9.9% would be very surprised they belong to the top 10%. The
graph of income is always growing exponentially, yet for some reason people
are throwing away the idea that they might be the ones to blame, because
people will naturally find argument that they're not to blame. It's always the
responsibility of someone else.

I personally have not lived the wealthiest life there is in term of income,
but you know, at least I don't complain, because when I compare it to the rest
of the world, being in the lower 50% or 60% or 30% in a modern and developed
country is still a pretty good life.

~~~
zjaffee
This is a big debate in the HN world too, where tech workers in that top 10%
think they are working class. The real breakdown here is that in todays day
and age, there's hardly a middle class, there's the working class who
struggles, lives basically paycheck to paycheck, and at the age of 45 has up
to 40k in wealth to their name. Then there's that top 10% whose able to afford
a million dollar home, take yearly vacations, send their kids to college, ect.

The things the upper middle class think should be a given to them because they
are within a certain economic strata are actually just regular luxuries.

~~~
seem_2211
Yep, you see it a lot in San Francisco (I've noticed it creeps into my mind a
lot more frequently than I'd like to admit).

The thing is, it's like the boiling a frog in water analogy. You get
desensitized to it. I tend to work with salespeople, so there's a tendency to
get flashier things than a lot of my programming friends, but it manifests in
things like always having the latest iPhone (or it's Android equivalent),
travelling internationally a couple times a year, going for brunch whenever
you feel like it, being able to save a good $10-15k yearly without really
trying. Maybe hitting Tahoe a few times in the winter. Going to Soulcycle or
Equinox to work out during the week. But you still can't buy a house in San
Francisco. So you don't feel rich, but compared to the average American you're
taking home a multiple of what they're making. It shocked me to find out the
average household income is about $60k annually.

We all live in a bubble. San Francisco is a bubble. Dayton Ohio is a bubble as
well. And when you live in a city with a ton of rich people (and a sizeable
population probably in the bottom 10%) it gets pretty easy to forget about the
other 80% who live somewhere in the middle of it all, in Concord, or
Pleasanton or whatever they call it in the East Bay.

~~~
geebee
"But you still can't buy a house in San Francisco."

Are you in a dual income family, and have you considered buying areas like the
Excelsior, Ingleside heights (excluding Ingleside terrace), Oceanview/Merced
Heights, Outer Mission, Portola, Silver Terrace, or other such neighborhoods?

I don't mean to dismiss your question, these are still expensive
neighborhoods, probably between 800k-1.2mil for something decent. This is
tough for two incomes, as the dual income thing means you're also stuck with
high childcare costs, which will probably be ~25k per kid in San Francisco
(I'm talking about the kind that allows you to go to work from 8am-6pm - and
even then you will have to recuse yourself from meetings to be at daycare by
6pm, officially surrendering your membership in the _young people are just
smarter and can focus on what 's important_ club in Silicon Valley
companies[1).

I do think this is in reach of the group you just described, though. 250k+
family income isn't unusual for two tech workers or other professionals in SF
(a programmer and dental hygienist pair, for example, should exceed this).

[1] [https://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-
entre...](https://venturebeat.com/2007/03/26/start-up-advice-for-
entrepreneurs-from-y-combinator-startup-school/)

~~~
seem_2211
I agree 100%. I meant to sum up the prevailing attitude on housing out here.

------
p49k
Rebuttal from Slate:

[https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-
atlantics-9-9-...](https://slate.com/business/2018/05/forget-the-
atlantics-9-9-percent-the-1-percent-are-still-the-problem.html?via=gdpr-
consent)

~~~
sologoub
Key paragraph:

“He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees.
According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of
all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is
held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth
data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution.
Stewart’s “9.9 percent” includes a lot of working professionals and business
owners with gilded academic résumés, sure. But it also probably encompasses a
lot of 75-year-old former accountants and nurses and guys with construction
businesses who made a comfortable living decades ago, bought a house, and paid
down the mortgage while saving for retirement. There’s no real way to tell a
consistent story about who these people are, which makes it a bit hard to
blame them for the death of opportunity in this country.”

~~~
JumpCrisscross
I don’t think that is a fair rebuttal. There has been a systemic transfer of
wealth from the young to the older. Social Security and pensions get funded;
universities and schools do not.

~~~
bhawks
Citation needed?

Education is the 2nd largest expenditure in California:

[https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_CA_statel...](https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_CA_statelocal)

Number 1 expenditure in Texas:

[https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_TX_statel...](https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_TX_statelocal)

People perceive education to be underfunded, but digging at the data it
definitely is one of the Government's highest spending priorities...

~~~
roywiggins
Student loan growth is arguably a decent proxy. Entire generations coming out
of school with negative wealth is a pretty new thing.

~~~
bhawks
Does this amount to a systemic transfer of wealth from young to old (OP's
complaint?)?

Student loan growth correlates to the (seemingly unbounded) rise of college
costs, along with the willingness of the Government to back loans for them?

I'd argue that college costs are rising specifically because it's so easy for
students to get loans because of Government intervention. :(

Also to be considered is that it used to be the case that entire generations
did not go to college (in fact we're only at 30% of folks now...).

~~~
JumpCrisscross
One still has a generation who were educated on subsidised education now
reducing those subsidies, per capita, to the next. The former then expects the
latter to work to fund their Social Security, Medicare and pensions as opposed
to working to redistribute those hand-outs over the broader population. (Not
taking a stance. Simply eliding a policy theme. My bet is SS, Medicare and
pensions will be dismantled within a few cycles to fund a UBI and universal
healthcare, with total pay-outs to seniors going down to pay for broader pay-
outs across the population.)

~~~
bhawks
There has been no reduction of education spending on a per-capita basis (or
any other form of measurement).

[https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_202...](https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_2023USd_19s2li011mcn_20t)

It has grown at an amazing rate (as have Medicare/pensions etc).

Half of the income of the middle 20% of retired folks (those making less than
$65K) comes from the government subsidies you'd like to cut. The 2nd 20% gets
2/3rds their income from the government and the bottom gets practically all of
it. Cuts here will materially impact the poorest elderly.

Citations:
[https://usafacts.org/reports/annual/2018](https://usafacts.org/reports/annual/2018)

My personal TL;DR is that we've been throwing money at all these problems and
they are still so far from being solved :( Actually throwing money around
seems to make things much worse.

People are taking a NIMBY style stance (cut those programs I don't use and
give me/people like me the difference -- definitely don't cut my programs)
that is not going to achieve anything but further animosity and grief :(

~~~
JumpCrisscross
You mention NIMBYism. I would regard that as the principal vector of wealth
transfer.

~~~
bhawks
Nimbyism is only a regional factor.

I think we agree this is a national conversation.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Local themes can manifest at scale. Many large cities are affected by
generational NIMBYism. That collects to produce a macroeconomic effect.

~~~
bhawks
But the data doesn't show that there's a bunch of rich old folks mooching on
the labor of everyone else.

Basically the median elderly person has enough money to pay off the median
house and then nothing else. After a lifetime of work isn't this acceptable?

Secondary source: [http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/time-to-bury-pew-
report...](http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/time-to-bury-pew-report-on-
wealth-by-age-group)

On mobile otherwise I would link in the primary data.

------
dgreensp
Wait, so 10% of the county is millionaires (more or less, if 9.9% are
1.2-millionaires), and these people have such “good family, good health, and
good jobs” that they might as well be a different species? If I tell you how
“good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if they are a
millionaire or not?

I think the author’s intent was to acknowledge privilege, but the article is
just making more weird caricatures. I think it’s better to put a spotlight on
particular ways people might not be able to advance themselves as much as the
usual narrative would suggest.

~~~
LateRuin
>If I tell you how “good” someone’s family or health is, you can tell me if
they are a millionaire or not?

Yes, I can. That's the point -- the rich and poor are far more visually
distinct today. Take for example obesity/overweight and marriage status. The
poor are far more likely to have both an elevated BMI and to be single parents
/ divorced / never married

~~~
analog31
I wouldn't have thought this until I had kids, who "forced" me to greatly
expand my social milieu beyond my fellow geeks and musicians.

Our kids got involved in some activities (e.g., violin lessons) that are
almost exclusively the domain of the upper middle class. I remember attending
a large group recital with maybe 100 kids, and virtually none of them were
obese.

~~~
dgreensp
I have young kids. If violin lessons are apparently so expensive as to require
you to be a millionaire (not merely, say, a six-figure-earner), what is a
class or event I can go to to see all the poor, obese kids that I haven’t come
across yet? I don’t live in a frou frou part of my town. It seems more likely
to me that cultural forces are at play.

~~~
marnett
> what is a class or event I can go to

they are poor. they don't go to events or extracurricular classes...those cost
money.

------
leetcrew
> Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had
> to come from the people below.

this statement is literally true, but aside from "in relative terms", the
wording of the whole sentence seems to evoke a zero sum game. I see this type
of writing in most articles about inequality and I wish the authors would
strive to be more explicit. it's an important distinction, even if we agree
that relative gains are just significant as absolute gains.

~~~
temp-dude-87844
The explicit invocation of the concept "zero-sum" is avoided because it's a
lightning rod for criticism, where someone will inevitably chime in to point
out the realization of absolute gains of utility among the losers also;
specifically, that important metrics like living standards have been improving
for wide swaths of the population, even those whose share of wealth declined
over time.

And therein lies the disconnect: both can be true, because one of them is a
tautology; and it just so happens that relative disparities in wealth among
the pool of people in market for a service will cause the competition to
attain some elements of an auction, and cause the poorer parties to lose out.

~~~
leetcrew
to be clear, I am not criticizing the author for not explicitly using the term
"zero-sum game"; however dysfunctional the economy may be, it is clearly not
that. I am criticizing the author for writing about relative gains using
language (e.g. "pie", "taking from", "giving up") that is clearly evocative of
a zero sum game. it encourages the uncareful reader to conflate absolute and
relative gains.

------
reggieband
This was a very long article so it doesn't surprise me that most people are
commenting on the 9.9% figure while missing the authors point. I've seen a
similar point made several times recently and it goes something like this:

The "true elites" have constructed a social and economic system that syphons
off the majority of wealth. The "wannabe elites" at the top of the remaining
pile are actually complicit servants of the elite (who cares if it is 9%, 11%
or whatever). These wannabes enjoy their privileges but realize their position
is precarious. Their anxiety at losing this position makes them more eager
servants to the elites and they become highly protective of their own
positions. Maintaining wannabe elite status is more important than effecting
societal change and it consumes all of their available resources and time.

The people at the bottom of the system are always upset and spend most of
their time fighting amongst themselves and scheming on how to get into the
privileged wannabe group. They spend all of their resources and time just
trying to survive. There is a constant threat that if this rabble becomes
angry enough then they will violently revolt. The elites like to remind the
wannabes that when the pitchforks come out then it will be for the wannabes,
those soft/weak knowledge workers who are unable to fly to their second home
in Europe. So, it is really in the wannabes best interest to quell the
dissent.

In this narrative, the alliance between the insanely rich and the dirt poor
makes sense. The real elites let the educated wannabes know they have their
finger on the button. They do so in subtle think pieces in the kind of
magazines the rabble won't read. Don't forget, your comfortable lifestyle is
predicated on serving the elites. If individually you rebel then you will lose
your privileges. If en-masse you rebel then there will be a violent revolt
directed at you. Good luck finding a way out of all of this is what the author
leaves us with.

The wannabes are the dupes in a con-game. We think we are in on the con and
yet we also realize that if things go bad then we'll be the ones left holding
the bag. We're being taught to accept an inherit complicity as a means to
convince us to keep going along with it. You already knew everything there was
to know before you read this article.

~~~
roywiggins
This tripartite split (elite, bourgeois, poor) is a very old one. I am sure I
read a paper in an undergrad poly-sci course that analyzed the fate of nations
based on which two teamed up against the third. Elites+poor is a pretty
dangerous combination because they end up catching civil society in the
pincers.

~~~
reggieband
The author did make the argument that revolutions that start from the middle
are usually less violent and chaotic. I don't have the relevant education to
know if that is true but I do know that I'd rather lead a revolution than be
the victim of it. To be fair to the author, that is his ultimate point.

It feels to me that the idea of sacrifice has become a secular heresy.
Humility as well. If the middle class has any hope of allying with the lower
class then those two traits will have to ascend from ashes. The real questions
is: are we too far gone and is it too late?

~~~
doktrin
> If the middle class has any hope of allying with the lower class then those
> two traits will have to ascend from ashes. The real questions is: are we too
> far gone and is it too late?

I'd honestly ask a slightly different question : how much longer will the
lower and middle classes pose a realistic threat to the elites?

To date, economic and social elites have always been at the theoretical mercy
of the masses simply by virtue of vastly inferior numbers. We're not _that_
far off from a day when - as a result of technological advances of various
kinds - a small minority could feasibly defend themselves both physically and
politically against the rest of society.

To me, that's honestly the real ticking time bomb. People can change, grow and
adapt to any number of situations - and are remarkably good at finding common
ground with their neighbors when necessity dictates. However, once the masses
lose their ability to meaningfully threaten the elites, the entire question
becomes moot and the ship will have sailed for a long, long time.

~~~
chii
> small minority could feasibly defend themselves both physically and
> politically against the rest of society

Look no further than China. They've already instituted a social credit system
to control the masses' political discourse, and to prevent dissidents from
gathering together and to have neutral groups turn against them for fear of
reprimands.

The future does not look good for the poor, and unlike yester-century, theres
enough surveylance technology and automation to snuff any rebel group before
critical mass.

------
fpig
If you pick 4.73% or 17.23% as the cutoff point you will reach the same
conclusions, the numbers behave as you would expect. I read a similar article
once that focused on the top 20% by income, this one focuses on top 10% by
wealth... The reality is that there is no "aristocratic cutoff point" \-
people get richer (and their incomes go up) faster _smoothly_ as you go
towards the right on the curve.

I don't understand why the author feels his "top 10%" cutoff is somehow
especially insightful and "smarter" than the 1% one. It is entirely arbitrary.

He says:

 _“We are the 99 percent” sounds righteous, but it’s a slogan, not an
analysis._

But if you do an analysis of the 1%, the advantages you ascribe to the 9.9%
will hold much more strongly. If you do it for the top 20% they will also
hold, but less strongly. You just picked a number and ran with it. There is
nothing insightful there.

Income inequality has been growing but what the author is attempting to do is
childish, although the article is surprisingly well-written considering how
stupid the core idea is.

~~~
tlb
Most readers aren't in the 1%, but most (Atlantic Monthly) readers are in the
10%. Articles about the 1% are about "them"; articles about the 10% are about
"us". That's a reasonable premise for an article: move the goalpost and show
what it's like to be on the other side of it.

------
seibelj
I believe very strongly in equality of opportunity, and the liberal tendency
to zone everything to prevent development and keep out the poors is a glaring
example of hipocrisy. I don’t know if charter schools are the answer, but
certainly letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars
could alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in
continuous power.

~~~
distances
> letting the family choose where to stick their education dollars could
> alleviate the vast difference in K12 education that keeps the “9.9%” in
> continuous power.

Could you elaborate what you mean by this? Wouldn't the best course of action
to give each school the same funding based on the number of pupils, and
additional funding for troubled areas in need?

~~~
seibelj
I think that we should let students from poor towns go to awesome schools in
rich towns even if they aren’t residents of the rich town. The wealthy self-
segregate by limiting low-income housing in their area to keep out the poors.

Similarly I think it should be easy to create a new school (charter or
whatever you want to call it) to compete with bad schools in poor districts.

But even without option 2, option 1 would be great. Would also let rich kids
interact with poor kids which will benefit everyone.

~~~
mark212
I disagree that it's segregating or done on purpose, but it is deeply unfair
that the price of a good "public" education is being able to afford the real
estate in that catchment area / school district.

~~~
toasterlovin
But it's ultimately the high price of the real estate in that area that makes
the schools good. We live in an economy where intelligent academic achievers
do pretty well. So expensive areas are highly skewed toward intelligent
academic achievers. Guess what kind of children they have...

~~~
mark212
I remain skeptical of that part. There are, however, plenty of cities in the
US where the school district boundaries are drawn very precisely to enable the
imposition of property taxes that support the schools. It becomes a sort of
private-public school, in the sense that all the homeowners in the district
pay extra and those schools have sports teams and labs and orchestra and field
trips that the kids on the other side of the line can only dream of.

(This is impossible in California, however, because the property taxes are set
at the county level and school districts have no control over their own
funding.)

~~~
toasterlovin
Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can tell you that the best schools there are
also in the wealthy neighborhoods, despite the funding issue you mention not
applying in California. And that's because the children of wealthy people have
the genetics and culture to do well in school.

------
matthewaveryusa
The top 10% is 120k in income or 1.2m in net worth -- would be nice to see the
demographics. In any case, 1.2m in net worth is a house with some retirement
money, not exactly what I would call aristocracy.

~~~
mrybczyn
And yet it's more than 90.1% of the population posesses...

Interestingly, some estimates of (formal) Polish aristocracy in the 17th
century place it around 10% of the population. Maybe this is just some natural
distribution of socio-econo-political status of human groups.

~~~
tscs37
As another comment here pointed out;

90.1% possess about 30% of the wealth.

9% possess another 30% of the wealth.

The remaining 0.9% possess the rest.

Is the 9% to blame for inequality?

~~~
Mbioguy
It's not about blaming the 9.9%. It's about convincing the 9.9% that they are
part of the problem. The way the author writes, he is in that group, speaking
to them. "We."

Compare to slavery. Obviously Southern slaveowners bear responsibility. But
were non-slaveowners, Northerners, etc free of the taint? No. Ulysses S. Grant
married into a slaveowning family and for years was supported by them.
Northern factory owners turned profits off the products of slavery. Regular
northerners purchased products produced by the system of slavery. Sure, some
are more responsible than others, but the whole country from North to South
bore the taint of slavery. Individuals giving up slaves didn't end slavery.
Raising awareness of slavery's evil to the point where it hit critical mass,
and then using power to force slaveholders to cease, that's how it ended.

This article is a member of the 9.9% speaking to others of the 9.9%, telling
them they cannot absolve themselves; that they cannot expect to escape without
consequence if the world turns again, as it has in the past.

In my mind the only question left to be addressed is how the power will be
wielded. Will it be a politicolegal revolution or a violent one?

------
ryandrake
In the past, nobody really attacked the rich because so many Americans think
they'll one day be in their shoes. In 2003, we learned that 19% of Americans
think they are in the richest 1% and a further 20% expect to be someday [1].
People have slowly woken up to the fact that their math was way off and class
mobility doesn't really work that way. The brief "Occupy" movement and the
identification of the 1% as a species largely unlike the rest of us shined a
big spotlight on a class of people who would rather not receive so much
attention. This article seems to be almost deliberately engineered to downplay
the 1%-vs-99% narrative that once illustrated a distinct oil-vs-water class
divide in the country. How better to confuse people about who the villains are
than to muddy the water by adding "slightly richer normal people" into the mix
with the plutocrats and Wall Street billionaires. This almost reads as a PR
piece, straight from the desk of the Koch brothers or a Wall Street managing
director: "Look over there! There's a hard working father of two who owns a
few laundromats and a family doctor with a vacation home! Those guys are
totally relatable to you poor people, _just like us billionaires_!"

1: [https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-
ho...](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hope-over-
self-interest.html)

~~~
CM30
> How better to confuse people about who the villains are than to muddy the
> water by adding "slightly richer normal people" into the mix with the
> plutocrats and Wall Street billionaires.

Eh, I feel that was done more by the increased focus on social issues and
race/gender/whatever tensions to be honest. Isn't it super convenient that all
these identity politics wars came about JUST after Occupy and the possibility
the rich were going to be in the firing line? Or that class usually isn't
mentioned there?

------
Areading314
"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had
to come from the people below"

The economy is not a zero sum game. Even though inequality is counter-
productive and undesirable, it does not mean that wealth has been
"transferred" to the top 1%/10%. The poorest quantiles have become more
wealthy over time as well, just at a slower rate. Here is some data on this:

[https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/1...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2017/09/19/u-s-
household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective)

~~~
dahauns
"The poorest quantiles have become more wealthy over time as well, just at a
slower rate."

For the last two decades, your source actually says the opposite. The lowest
three quintiles peaked in the dot-com bubble, with the bottom quintile losing
the most (almost 10%) and only the middle quintile just recently reaching
those levels again.

~~~
Areading314
Agreed, I meant over time as in over the last century. Interesting that the
90s was this much of a peak though!

------
eternalban
I couldn't help but think of Eyes Wide Shut when reading this. For those who
have seen the film, the leading character, a physician who lives in Upper East
Side in Manhattan, easily fits the bill (npi) of being a 9.9%er. But as
Kubrick makes it clear, he is merely a well paid servant of the true hidden
aristocracy, and very much preoccupied with matters that are of no concern to
the aristocratic class.

I agree with the other commentators' critique of OP here. The 9.9%ers are the
new Social 'Thin Blue Line' [1].

Here's the recruitment advert in case you are interested :)
[https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE](https://youtu.be/LHtNFZ6K0pE)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line)

~~~
kolbe
That was just a fictional movie, man. I wouldn't read too much into that.

~~~
sgt101
Bit like Chekhov?

------
mistrial9
This headline feeds into knee-jerk tendency to assign a simple social class
category to some combination of money, prestige, agency (ability to drive
change) and status; from the ground-view, reality is nothing like that now.
There is no simple formula for any of those things, being very well decoupled.

------
acjohnson55
I see this piece less as an identification of the 9.9% as being "the problem"
so much as it is a call to get people who are doing well to acknowledge that
we exist in a vortex of generational success that is rather exclusive of most
of the country.

------
FrozenVoid
A clever manipulation piece: It melds 1% multi-millionaires with upper-middle
class to create some kind of bourgeois enemy. In reality these 32 million
people have different lifestyles, sources of income and their networth does
not indicate true wealth: they could be living in an expensive house that they
bought much cheaper, but a few trips into a hospital will bankrupt them. The
whole concept of "net worth" is highly deceptive and can be manipulated into
framing economic importance as function of potential wealth(if "X sold all
their property" vs actual currency reserves).

~~~
CamTin
Not accounting for people's home equity when determining their wealth is one
of the most bonkers bougie things I've ever heard. Should we not count their
401k savings either, because "if X took the early withdrawal penalty" isn't
fair either?

If you're rich, you're rich. It makes no difference if that wealth is tied up
in illiquid assets. If the precarity if your financial situation is based on
the fact that you're worth millions but have decided for some reason to leave
it invested in one large, volatile asset, then you don't get to claim you're
in the same boat as someone who is pawning their wedding ring until payday to
make rent.

Being rich but poorly invested (90% of your net worth is in your home equity)
is a decision you made, not a situation you found yourself born into.

~~~
FrozenVoid
>If you're rich, you're rich. I'm not even middle class, i don't own a house
or a car. I just see that people easily overgeneralize the well-off 30 million
upper-middle class with truly rich people who have entirely different
lifestyle. Believing the there is 32million strong aristocracy is delusional,
all these SJW privilege Olympics make your kind seem insane and full of envy.
You want to lump middle-class people with multi-millionaires with financial
security and proclaim them the unified burgeios enemy that must be dealt with.
"If they have some money, They're rich capitalist pigs" Its like some soviet
union guilt trip: If you own jeans your dangerous bourgie class traitor! If
you listen to foreign radio = capitalist lapdog. If you own foreign currency =
speculator and capitalist. Soviet Union glamorized poverty and struggle,
everyone was LARPing as some poor, honest worker despite a black market,blat
and bribery being commonplace. If you dislike Bourgeois(aka Middle class) so
much, why don't take one-way ticket flight to socialist paradise of Venezuela?
They're getting rid of their toxic privileged Bourgeois class.

Just for the record i'm NOT some "free-market will fix it" capitalist: I'm in
favor of sane, Scandinavian-like system of democracy(also promoted by Bernie
Sanders as democratic socialism) which exist with support of high taxes. I'm
against gulags, wealth redistribution and marking people as class
traitors/privileged/"eat the Rich", to which any communist country eventually
devolves.

~~~
CamTin
Well that escalated quickly. I'm not saying "people with adequate, diversified
retirement savings are evil capitalists." I'm just saying that "We shouldn't
count the value of people's houses when determining how wealthy they are." is
absurd. Clearly it should count. They own it.

It's not a political stance, just a pro-accuracy one.

~~~
FrozenVoid
The problem with it these people will not sell their houses. Its not a liquid
capital. Selling their only house would be something like once-in-lifetime
decision.

What i'm saying, and you're failing to understand is that a if citizen A has a
million dollar house and 10K in savings but his income is very low, he is
actually much much poorer than citizen B who has 1.01million in cash, 80K
salary and rents an apartment.

>"Pro-accuracy" Its clearly obvious B has more economic impact, but with
networth they seem as identical.

~~~
leetcrew
your argument essentially reduces to "$1.01mm net + $80k salary is much more
well off than $1.01mm net + low salary". unless A happens to be a financial
wizard, this is always going to be true no matter how A's assets are
allocated. i'm not sure what your point is with respect to counting primary
residences in net worth. if A were truly worse off for having the house (and
they very well may be with that lopsided allocation), they could just sell it.
a typical yearly return on $1.01mm is very close to the median household
_income_ in the US.

------
mirko22
Which form of society would allow for complete equality?

Where everyone has the same things to eat, drink and learn and everyone is
missing the same things (usually luxury).

I can’t think of any social system like that mostly cos it all involves people
and not all people are the same and will behave differently inevitably wanting
different stuff which will lead to more more inequality over time.

Maybe someone has ideas?

~~~
prolikewhoa
Socialism, Communism? The workers owning the means of production and abolition
of private property? Cuba is doing fairly fine despite decades of American
propaganda & the embargo. It has its problems, but so does USA or any country
for that matter.

~~~
mirko22
Not necessarily existing system. Any system where people are _truly_ equal.

Even in communism you will have leaders, and leaders will enjoy some form of
higher privilege. So collective ownership of the, in lack of the better word,
stuff would still not abolish social privileges, which people renowned in some
manner would have.

Likewise, different responsibility instiled in people by any means, will
undoubtedly lead to different performance in the work place, which will, in
some way or other, separate them from general social or material status.

So, it seems to me, best we could do is some form of society wich has low band
of frequency in which people can move in any type of self emerging hierarchy
so everyone enjoys nearly the same status.

But how do you deal with over achievers then? There would inevitably be people
who, with their performance, go out of that band.

You might start by separating achievers that contribute or take from society
which would then lead to having some form of arbitars which would in turn
again enyjoy some type of higher status.

And so on... the only truly equal society is the one where everyone share the
same thoughts and goals and do the same things, as any deviation into
something new could spell special privileges for that individual.

And i do this only as a thought experiment, cos I am stuck in the loop of if
not all people think and do the same thing how can we expect them to be
same... So maybe someone has ideas about this. Maybe I am just crazy.

------
spicymaki
The reporting on this seems rather empty. Yes economic inequality is growing,
yes the new rich are delusional about it, and yes that will lead to economic
and social catastrophe. Elites like being elite because it excludes everyone
else. That’s the point of it. How do you convince those in power to not
consolidate it and pass it on to their offspring?

~~~
danharaj
Insurrection, if it comes to that?

------
kayeetong
Those doctors, dentists and lawyers he mentions are drowning in loans -
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-
stud...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-meru-has-1-million-in-student-
loans-how-did-that-happen-1527252975)

------
solidsnack9000
Many commenters have highlighted faults in this article. Maybe the 9.9% aren't
to blame; maybe they aren't a meaningful classification to begin with; maybe
there is more to the story than people hauling the ladder up after themselves.
Yet these criticisms miss the author's warning: regardless of the causes, when
substantial inequality obtains, opting into the social contract looks like a
good idea for a smaller and smaller subset of people. That's when civil
society falls apart. To not beggar thy neighbor is not only generosity,
fairness, respect for human dignity -- it is also prudence.

------
solidsnack9000
_It is entirely possible to get a good education at the many schools that
don’t count as “good” in our brand-obsessed system. But the “bad” ones really
are bad for you. For those who made the mistake of being born to the wrong
parents, our society offers a kind of virtual education system. It has places
that look like colleges—but aren’t really. It has debt—and that,
unfortunately, is real. The people who enter into this class hologram do not
collect a college premium; they wind up in something more like indentured
servitude._

A surreal and sad vision.

~~~
LoonyBalloony
What better way to teach kids how the real world works then scamming them?

------
zneveu
I really enjoyed reading this piece. The author poses several rhetorical
questions that I think could use evidence to support their assumed
conclusions, but overall this piece seems very well informed and sheds light
on a class of people that I am very familiar with but had never divided out in
my head.

------
throw2016
The embrace of neoliberalism in the 80s decimated the traditional middle
class. Wages stagnated and labor share of income has taken a hit [1] while
capital ascended.

Debt has become the biggest product leading to wide scale financialization and
rent seeking. Lobbying and revolving doors has further added to entrenched
interests benefiting at the cost of the whole.

This is at the heart of how you define a country, a collection of economic
interests arbitrated by the market as an end in itself, or a 'society' with
larger goals. The neoliberalism agenda has convinced many of the first.

[1] [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/capitals-share-
incom...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/capitals-share-income-way-
higher-think.html)

------
arduanika
Reading this article makes me think of the word choice that new button on
Facebook that lets you report that a link is a "false" news story. Notice the
subtle shift away from the populist phrase — the accusation is not that the
news is "false", but rather "fake".

The facts in this piece are by and large true (although if you look closely
you can see a few opinions and judgement calls that have calcified into
facts). However, Stewart's class confessional is the essence of "fake news",
in that it assumes a viewpoint, speaks authoritatively and factually from it,
and ignores the gaping details that would contradict his story.

The assumed viewpoint gets slipped into the middle of a sentence like this:
"Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, _in relative terms_ ,
had to come from the people below". Read: increases in absolute wealth do not
matter; it's all about the Joneses. Just as when postmodernists academics
obsess over power hierarchies, you can see the hunger for power at the core of
their doctrine, so it is here: when pop-socio-economists talk to no end about
inequality, you can see that they are driven not by a desire to improve
conditions, but by envy and by (as Stewart projects onto the Trump base)
resentment.

Where is the discussion of poverty here? Stewart cares not a whit about
poverty. Ctrl-F for it: the single instance of is in the phrase “relative
poverty”.

Thus we get a sentence such as “We are the staff that runs the machine that
funnels resources from the 90 percent to the 0.1 percent”, which is dynamite
verbiage if you clicked on this article in order to wallow in your upper
middle class guilt. But read closer: the wealth of the 90% has, in point of
fact, not gone down, merely stagnated. They have not been funneled from,
except in these relative, zero-sum terms.

As far as the “gaping details”, any discussion of inequality that is so
myopically focused on one country in the global system is missing the big
picture. Here’s what’s been going on with actual, absolute wealth since the
70’s: huge swaths of the developing world have been raised out of poverty. A
few lucky, skilled, well-positioned, and/or hardworking elites, both in the US
and abroad, have gotten fabulously rich off the new global economy. And yes,
incomes for the bottom 90% in the US and Western Europe, far from keeping pace
with this global growth, have risen hardly at all.

(How does this story of massive poverty relief play out for the secondary
concern of inequality? Exactly as advertised in every true-but-fake screed,
wealth inequality has skyrocketed within the United States, and within China,
and within [insert your country here, probably]. What is scrupulously avoided
by Stewart and others is that, as the gap _between_ countries narrows, the
overall contour and slope of the global wealth distribution has remained
roughly constant).

If you do care to grapple with the messy data, you could pick worse starting
places than here: [https://ourworldindata.org/income-
inequality](https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality) (although you can
see in the title that Roser and Ortiz-Ospina are already starting from two
wrong premises: that “inequality”, not poverty, is the topic at hand, and that
“income”, not wealth, is the natural locus of that inequality).

However, Stewart mentions none of this. If we assume good faith, we can chock
the omission up to Stewart’s ignorance and his meager qualification to preach
on this topic. If we assume bad faith, then his careful aggregation of
confirmatory true facts and dismissal of the big picture data is straight up
mendacious, or as the tweeter of the best words puts it, fake.

Note that this characterization is not personally specific to Stewart. It
applies also to the fake rebuttal from Slate in the link above. Both magazines
assume the premise that inequality is the problem, not poverty, and then they
bicker about the cutoff point. Of course the 1% gatekeeps against the 99%! You
could write just as incisive (and factually correct) an analysis of the 0.1%
gatekeeping against the 99.9%, or of the 5% against the 95%, and on down the
line. But to say that gatekeeping is the _whole_ story is to succumb to the
zero-sum fallacy. To say that violins exist merely to get my kid into Harvard
ahead of yours is reductionistic, impoverished thinking that may help you
sleep but will not, in the long run, win you any elections.

The wealth story is global. Progress is real. The pie has gotten bigger.
Poverty, not inequality, is the issue to tackle. Teapot Dome and Enron are the
exception, not the rule. Facts are messy. Class is a continuum. And to suggest
otherwise is fake news.

~~~
CamTin
I totally agree that we've made great progress in providing material abundance
since the start of the fossil fuel era.

Unfortunately, we're heading toward the end of this era. Without some kind of
miracle (this isn't totally unlikely, but we can't exactly count on it), we
_will_ have to either dramatically lower our average standard of living, or
reduce our population, in order not to totally overwhelm the planet's carrying
capacity and therefore die out totally. Most likely, we'll need to do a bit of
each.

The trouble is that it's hard to get most people behind a plan that says,
basically "We are reducing everyone's standard of living, including those of
you making $1/day and those of you making $100,000 a minute. We all have to do
our part."

A still-difficult but much easier sell is "We're reducing inequality by giving
some of us a hand up, and the richest of us are going to pitch in to help. We
can't all live like Trump or the Sultan of Brunei but we can all be free from
want without destroying the planet or suffering any mass-genocides."

The easiest sell of all is "We can all be _rich_ and live like modern-day
Americans for eternity! All we need to do is de-regulate all of these job-
creating, wealth-producing industries and boom! Invisible hand!" But that's a
lie.

Unfortunately, the easiest sell is the one that gets sold, but that's not to
say that the middle one isn't something we can shoot for when the Plan A
status quo becomes coming apart at the seams. Whether that will be too late
remains to be seen.

------
mozumder
Class differentiation is the central meaning of life. The struggle is the
point. You get up and wear nice clothes in the morning so that you're better
than the slob that doesn't. Nobody wants to be the same as everyone else.

If everyone was equal, then there would be no point in your existence. You
become a bag of mostly water.

Celebrate the fact that a few billionaires and royalty and celebrities exists.
Life is more interesting and surprising that way. Can you imagine how terrible
and pointless everything would be if everyone was middle class?

We should focus on the very bottom, not the very top.

~~~
wybiral
It's possible for us to focus both on improving conditions at the very bottom
and also trying to understand how a very small percentage at the very top is
siphoning so much out of our shared system.

I would argue that both issues are worth looking at.

~~~
ainiriand
We have people very rich, more than ever before. And that is just by itself
something worth of careful examination. But a lot of that wealth is new. There
are effective mechanisms to not being poor. More people can access to self-
improvement tools than ever before.

So yes, we should focus on the lower end of the scale.

~~~
wybiral
> a lot of that wealth is new

Where is the "new" wealth coming from?

> There are effective mechanisms to not being poor.

That seems like a generalization to me that doesn't factor in location, race,
access to good education, medical conditions, existing debt, etc.

> So yes, we should focus on the lower end of the scale.

Why not both?

~~~
sabarn01
Where I grew up there was around 60% poverty, and most of the poverty was
communicated via terrible life choices passed one generation to the next.
Every one I know who left have done well and that includes people who join the
military to those who went to collage. So much of poverty is about the culture
you are born into which translates into bad decision and poor outcomes. If we
could do anything destroying the cultures that create these conditions would
get us more for our buck.

------
josephby
Dupe:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Birth%20of%20the%20New%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Birth%20of%20the%20New%20American%20Aristocracy&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

~~~
Fnoord
Apparently if it didn't create meaningful discussion it isn't a dupe.

