
Wealth of millionaires surges 10.6% to top $70 trillion for the first time - cmurf
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/06/19/wealthy-millionaires-global-stocks/711875002/
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MR4D
Given the aging demographic trend over most of the world, both the number of
and wealth of millionaires _should_ be increasing.

What most people (and this article) tend to ignore is that a 65 year old
should be richer than a 25 year old. 40 years of good savings discipline will
lead to a nice number. Maybe not a million, but a large sum regardless.

Instead, this article wants to focus on the ultra-high net worth (although the
article uses a $30 million cutoff instead of the usual $40 million). In the
end, you have an article that is more likely to divde people than get people
to say say, "wow, those older folks sure did a good job savings - I should do
that so I can be like them." Instead we get the opposite.

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mrguyorama
At least in the US, those old folks definitely did not do a good job of
saving. The boomer generation did not save money.

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mac01021
The ones I know personally all did...

Much of HN likely lives in a similar bubble.

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barbegal
Isn't this due to inflation? A couple of percent decrease in the value of the
dollar makes a huge number of new millionaires.

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jganetsk
Asset price inflation, yes. Not consumer price inflation, which has been low
to nonexistent for a very long time.

So when the bubble bursts, their wealth will come surging right back down.

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debt
Wealth concentration of this magnitude seems like an extremely inefficient
allocation of capital. Dollars get things done and having them concentrated
and controlled in a just a few spots seems like the worst way to apply their
value. A person of this level of wealth has no problem using the wealth simply
for personal gain.

 _The concentration of wealth seems to undermine democracy._

Democracy seems to be working out decently well, concentration of wealth seems
to run counter to democratic ideals. I guess that's how it has always been in
capitalism: undemocractically-selected application of larger amounts of
capital.

For instance, if one of these wealthy people decides to spend on a $1BB on PR
campaign to run for office and they win; they will have effectively bought the
outcome of the election like any other off-the-shelf product.

 _This level of wealth inequality could be a national security risk._

If the level of wealth concentration gets too high, we could start seeing a
new market of privately-owned paramilitary sharing the space with what was
originally occupied by branches of the military.

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s2g
> Democracy seems to be working out decently well

Doesn't seem to be working particularly well in the US.

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debt
Meh it has a few bugs, definitely currently on an unstable build, but it's a
huge enterprise system with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and
technical debt but it's still running though after almost 200+ years.

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Simon_says
What a worthless statistic. No normalizing for the number of millionaires or
for inflation. And a million dollars ain't what it used to be.

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Avshalom
It's still ~50 years of the average _household_ income in the USA. Which is to
say more than most Americans will make in their entire lives.

~~~
Simon_says
More like 17.

~~~
evilduck
59k is an average household income and average households have 2.5 people,
which is likely two incomes (over 60% of households).

That becomes closer to something like 33 years, which nudges close to the
boundaries of most people's entire working life.

edit: national average wage index for 2016 was 48,642, so I guess for a
working individual thats about 20 years then.

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Simon_says
The only thing I'm getting out of this is that the average person who saves
modestly and invests can accumulate significantly more than a million bucks in
a normal working career. None of which is relevant to my original point of the
worthlessness of this particular metric.

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Symmetry
As both global economic growth and inflation continue the fraction of the
world's inhabitants with more than the arbitrary $1,000,000 cutoff will
continue to grow. Not that net worth is always the best measure of wellbeing,
the person with the least net worth in the world is an American with billions
in debt despite his several mansions and I don't think he's worse off than I
am.

