
Report finds wealth of top 1% up $21T, bottom 50% down $900B since 1989 - microwavecamera
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/06/14/top-1-up-21-trillion-bottom-50-down-900-billion/
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mquander
Don't fall for it:

> This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their
> net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth.

The "top 1%" and "bottom half" are categories, not entities. They are made up
of different people in 1989 and 2019, not the same people getting richer and
poorer respectively. The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people
having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less.
This is not what the statistic means.

~~~
ajross
So... what is the lesson you want us to take away? It's true that individuals
have varying amounts of success and move in and out of any given bracket all
the time, but why is that important to what is clearly a demographic point?

On average, if you were poor in the 80's you're poorer now. Some of your poor
cohort aren't as poor, and some have lifted themselves out of poverty
entirely. Yet _more_ of them are doing worse than they were.

That's bad, right? It's a problem you'd like to see fixed, yes? And it
certainly _is_ what the statistic means.

~~~
rland
Not only that. It'd be better to be poor in the 1980s, because since then it
has become more difficult to move out of poverty.

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peisistratos
Most work for wages. Workers work a few hours a day creating wealth and
keeping the wealth they create. The last few hours a day, they keep absolutely
none of the wealth they keep - it is expropriated by heirs. It is a social
relationship - we work, they live off our labor. They are parasites, and they
have little helpers who they give crumbs to and argue their case, including
those who tell guileless fools that a magic man who lives in the clouds named
Jesus will make sure they never die.

~~~
dvdhnt
Man, you had me until you went religious. I think -

1) those people have appropriated Christianity since at least King James, as
Jesus and his ministry promoted socialism aka selling all of your belonging to
fund social programs; 2) we need to stop distracting from the primary topic of
wealth inequality / late stage capitalism. Slipping in jabs against capitalism
just gives "those" people a leg to stand on and the ability to redirect the
conversation.

If anything, we should force them to confront the hypocrisy of their
political/economic policies when compared to their religion.

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hueving
And how did the top 49% do? A.k.a all of the middle class and above.

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mdorazio
I'm confused by this. It doesn't quite mesh with the more recent numbers I'm
familiar with such as [1], which shows modest gains for the bottom 50% wealth
households from 2013 to 2016 [1]. My guess is that the dotcom bust recession
and great recession both knocked down bottom-half wealth holders far more than
the interim percentage gains to arrive at the net decrease quoted here.

[1] [https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth-brackets-one-
per...](https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth-brackets-one-percent/)

~~~
y4mi
It's hard to actually understands the current state of our economy and I doubt
I do to any significant degree, but from what I gathered from your linked
article, they're purely looking at net-worth.

This ignores inflation and rising housing costs etc.

~~~
mdorazio
I guess I'm not understanding the difference between net-worth and wealth in
economic terms here then. I assumed they were roughly equivalent.

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daenz

      >People's Policy Project
      >The primary mission of 3P is to publish ideas and analysis that assist in the development of an economic system that serves the many, not the few.
    

Some article titles:

    
    
      >Tackling Inequality Through the Social Ownership of Capital
      >Capitalism is hostile to families. The welfare state can fix that.
      >The Difficulty of Using the Firm in Socialist Policy
    

With this as context, it's pretty easy to see that the thread's post is
clearly anti-capitalist, socialist propaganda, with a heavy political agenda
to make people mad at "the rich" and support overthrowing "the system."

~~~
ballenarosada
Would you like to engage with the ideas in the piece?

~~~
daenz
It's essentially "rich people are richer than me, and that makes me mad."
There is no novel idea here to engage with. People have been jealous of wealth
since the beginning of time. But now we cloak that jealously with faux moral
outrage and elaborate economic "solutions."

~~~
orwin
Workers are poorer. That's the issue. Wage slave is not just a fancy
association of world, it is now the state of a lot of people.

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RickJWagner
Maybe so. But the poor of today (at least in the US, which the article is
about:

\- Have smart phones (entertainment)

\- Have climate controlled housing

\- Have better food than the poor of 1989

\- Have fewer diseases and live longer than their 1989 counterparts

\- etc.

It's not fun being poor, but there's never been a better time.

In a similar way, the rich don't live _that much_ better than the next lowest
classes. A middle class home feels more like a McMansion than the rich/poor
housing comparison of 1989.

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siculars
So, like, everyone gets the same return in the market - say 5% S&P500 avg
return - and so the total return on more money is more than the return on less
money, because math.

1.05x100<1.05x1000

And, of course, we all know those with capital get better returns on
everything and access to all opportunities. Hence the rich get richer. But
that's life and math. So?

~~~
ajross
Those numbers don't match the ones in the article. Or the real world. If the
bottom half of society was getting the "same return in the market" (for any
definition of market) _it wouldn 't be poorer than it was in 1980_.

