The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks

The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses on top of the public debt, became the leader of the new nation and enjoyed no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves. Today we can see the same thing happening again with different rich guys' names. But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.

"they will want change by force"

Won't happen in a society where elders are more numerous than young. In the past it required a lot of young males thinking they have not much to lose, but they are becoming extinct.

Old people won't revolt, middle-aged fathers that need to think of their children and mortgage won't revolt.

We are living in feudal system at the moment. Amazon, cloud providers and everything seems to be subscription based nowadays - as Yanis Varoufakis calls it "techno-feudalism". We have system which funnels unimaginable amounts of money to few overlords, it'll keep reinforcing itself creating more and more contrast with time. Open source everything seems to be the only answer if you ask me.

Global average age is higher than it has ever been and it keeps climbing. My stupid take is, we will continuously live in unprecedented territories for the foreseeable future, because needs, wants, abilities, thinking style of humans change as they age.

The peasant had to pay 20% tax and had free housing and food and worked half the amount of hours / year that we work. And they got revolutions. What does it tell about us?

That is the argument made by Piketty in his book.

It's not so much "inequality is evil" (tho he surely think so), but rather "inequality breeds catastrophic revolutions".

Inequalities by themselves are not really a problem. I don't care about other peoples palaces if I can live comfortably in my small house. In fact, if said palace is well maintained and tasteful, it can make for a beautiful landmark everyone can enjoy seeing.

It only becomes a problem if people are miserable, the palace stops being a beautiful landmark and becomes a symbol of oppression.

Back to stocks, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with the top 10% owning 87% of the stocks (in the US, because apparently, the rest of the world doesn't exist...). The stock market is risky, that's really a thing for those who have all their basic needs covered and can afford to lose big. Owning stock i.e. investing in companies is also among the most best things to society the rich can do, compared to, say, building palaces for themselves.

All that to say that if some causes are worth revolting against, I just don't think inequality in stock ownership is one of them.

Absurd.

Inequality doesn’t matter really nowadays. There will be no revolution as most of people are out of poverty despite what narration on the internet is.

Living conditions as today day poor person are immensely better than 18 or 19th century peasants.

Whoever has billions does not affect me having running water in faucets and me enjoying life.

Warm water is not all there is to life but it is a lot.

No, because the richer one is the more one can endure. In a market crash, the rich can just survive with their own stash of liquid money and when the time is ripe they can sweep in and buy for cheap the stocks of middle class investors trying to liquidate to make ends meet

The 2008 stock market crash famously reduced inequality. Definitely didn't increase inequality by leaving the average person (via government bailouts) holding the bag.

It has not been possible for decades in Southern Europe countries for decades, that is why most people live with their parents and only leave home when married, and then get credits that last all the way until they retire, assuming they live that long in first place.

Or eventually get the parents house from generation to generation.

The Fed has a few papers on this issue. Their conclusion is basically that the young will eventually inherit the wealth and market forces will force a redistribution. Thus it solves itself eventually.

I personally think that the Fed papers are just designed as an excuse to print money, but my point is the Fed is very far from seeing this as a problem and will never act to remedy it.

> Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.

At least in Finland today it's much easier for young people to buy their 1st home now compared to 15 years ago. Interest rates are roughly where they were 15 years ago, but house prices in real terms have gone way down. There's also huge market asymmetry with large amount of vacant properties that nobody wants to buy, and relatively few buyers.

As far as I know the stock market has winners and losers.

If you're not rich but invested whatever you could over the course of your life and now the market tanks to where you've lost half (or more) of what you had then someone else is going to win that from you.

A massively rich company can hold out a lot longer than a software developer who tucked away what they could over the years. If a real crash happens that software developer just got 30 years of their net worth mostly vaporized in a few months.

How much of the population is in that category? It's the whole middle class basically. It's a crushing blow to most folks when the market crashes for a long period of time. It's even worse for folks who are already in a position of barely scraping by while putting a little bit aside whenever they can. That person is destroyed if a majority of that disappears because they may have to sell it off on the spot just to survive because if the market really crashes, you can be sure a ton of people are going to be out of work.

not always

in the great depression, the crash did reduce inequality

in the covid19, the crash increased inequality

my opinion is that nowadays, fortune is highly financialized.

during a crisis, for most(99.99%) ordinary people who are in the market, they suffer the real lose, and they have nothing to comeback, even have to sell their assets to pay their bills, all they can get from the goverment is something like food banks, or the best situation, get a job to sell their labor

but for certain people either hold enough cash or can obtain enough cash from government relief programs, putting them in a position of advantage, this enables them to quickly reap a large amount of wealth during an economic crisis.

No, they always win. A stock market crash could actually be a boon to them to grab free chips on the table.

They are only scared of one thing.

I personally think we should resist the temptation to separate out values from the discussion. Like, even if it was the case that some extremely high-level of inequality turned out to be "optimal" in some GDP-maximizing way, the question still ought to hinge on some notion of fairness or justice (in my view).

(Although, I guess if your metric is "citizen satisfaction" maybe that's not as terrible).

In any case, there are lots of case studies showing what happens at the extreme inequality end of the spectrum. As I mentioned in another comment, my favorites come from Piketty "Capital in the 21st Century" and Acemoglu & Robinson "Why Nations Fail".

In the latter, the case study on the rise and fall of Venice is particularly fascinating - huge economic growth due to inclusive economic institutions that promoted social mobility, followed by a downturn once the aristocracy moved to entrench their own interests at society's expense. This seems to be the central thesis of the book, although I'm only a few chapters in.

The parallels with modern US politics are pretty hard to ignore though.

>In any kind of non-uniform distribution of any good

Not in any kind. It is absolutely the case, if there's mostly untaxed generational wealth transfer. Imagine this - you are born in this world with nothing. And every parcel of land and property is owned by somebody - somebody who with high likelihood inherited it or hundreds of millions or billions of assets on spawn.

Now obviously, you can inherit all sorts of other factors too - like very valuable social networks and a set of trade skills carefully passed down and tought. But even neglecting those, the largely untaxed generational wealth transfer would naturally lead to massive inequalities and disproportionate amounts of wealth concentrated in few families.

I think we can start with the work of Gary Stevenson. He made a few points on why inequality is bad.

When there’s massive inequality in the system, the super rich will compete with you for resources. Resources can include:

- Housing, of which fewer and fewer people could afford owning at the median income level

- Education, think buying access to spots at top schools and the ability to afford the fees/debt

- Political power, think Elon Musk in the western world

- Media/consensus, think Jeff Bezos, and think blaming of immigrants for house prices

- In the current tax system, the super rich could inherit wealth while paying very little tax, and they can borrow money at very low rates collaterized with the massive amounts of assets their own: meanwhile some of us pay a 30-50% tax on our income and are struggling to save for a downpayment or retirement.

With the massive financial power of the super rich, it’s not so much that this is bad in an “evil” way. Rather, it’s bad for the rest of us because the super rich are indifferent to us in pursuit of their own agendas in the “cosmic indifference” kind of way. Just as how we humans destroy anthills with an indifference if they get in the way of road constructions, the super rich would “run over” us if it benefits them.

> What's always missing to me in these types of discussions is what this value should be at, and what the distribution should look like qualitatively (i.e. what should the ideal Lorenz curve look like).

Just looking "more uniform" would be a great starting point. The optimal distribution is left as an open question for future research.

Not having the perfect solution upfront should not block incremental improvements, which is more or less what is happening ATM. E.g. people argue we cannot have free healthcare because the proverbial "welfare queen" will also receive it.

The most in-depth historical and empirical analysis of wealth inequality that I know of was done by Picketty et al. He is quite famous, so you can easily google his main research findings.

The upshot is that wealth inequality is above or close to historical high points and that it has actual and severe real world negative consequences.

And of all the metrics, spending has increased the most in the examined time period. Up from 36% in 1989.

Also when scaling tech/platforms this is a big factor in how many people can actually pay.

Every scaled up platforms then gets trapped into collecting/selling personal data and flooding the field with Ads (and obviously in these ad auctions the 10% can outbid the majority so Ad prices keep rising).

I think this is a pretty good example of the vast disconnect between reasonably high wealth and low wealth families. If you're in the bottom bracket, it's very likely you don't even have a vacation in any meaningful way, at best you have time off. The lower you are in the division, the starker the difference.

Yes? How long has it been since you checked what income percentile you are in? I would expect most of the posters here to be in the top 5%, with a short tail of unemployed and retirees.

The number of Americans with passports is at an all time high of 48%, and some of that is simply for convenience ID for internal flights.

Well yeah, European here so things might be a little different, but our family's budget for holydays was usually around 1500-2500$. As a result I've never travelled outside Europe. I've only flown to the Canary Islands twice and otherwise travelled by car. Big money saver. And also camping is cheaper compared to AirBnB and hotels. Though you can usually squeeze two weeks out of that budget.

It's possible to stay in an Airbnb for longer than a week on that budget. But yes I think you have broadly understood what that means. I'm not an expert myself but it sounds about right to me. I would guess the fact it's shocking to you is an indication of how segregated society can be.

Those numbers exclude airfare and other transportation costs.

And you need both time and money for a vacation. The average American family probably can't take 2-3 weeks off to travel every year, which makes their vacations shorter and cheaper.

You can rent the 2 bedroom house across the street from me as a foreigner for $200 per month on the local platform. It is 200 meters from a nice empty beach. If you speak the local language and are willing to compromise (alley and 700 meters from the beach) then half that may be achievable.

In the Netherlands, a financial advisory board (NIBUD) advises people to save 10% of their income. The average yearly income being around € 45K comes to a € 4.5K yearly saving. Deduct unexpected costs + that you want to spend part of this on actual savings _and_ realizing that many people don't manage to save that much due to increasing prices + senseless spending (subscriptions, fast fashion, etc.) makes it much less surprising.

Also, Hotels and Airbnb's are incredibly expensive (even for me, working a decent job with a good income) for families. That's why i chose campings over hotels and bought a decent tent.

Sounds like my holiday budget. My primary school kid has never flown an airplane, nor been in a hotel, but a few airbnb's, road trips. I would say it's for climate reasons, but really it's the money.

I am taking a deep dive into inequality thanks to Gary Stevenson. He has a lot of educational videos on his channel. Highly recommended.

Here's how I would sum up his main argument: Ordinary people have less money and can no longer afford to buy property. Governments have less money, infrastructure everywhere is eroding. So where does all the wealth go? The only possible answer is to the very rich, who are doing better than ever, while everyone else is down financially.

To be clear, this is not about the entrepreneur who made a couple million bucks and has three houses. It's about the top 0.1 % who are sucking everyone else dry, permanently: The poor, the middle class, and the government.

We need to do something to reverse this trend. And soon.

I really enjoy Gary Stevenson - both his YouTube channel and his book - but his very convincing message that wealth inequality is a problem isn't really accompanied by any particularly good solutions. Tax the wealthy yes, but how do you do it exactly? How much does it raise? How should the revenue be spent?

The book "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" by Walter Scheidel makes a similar argument:

> Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...

Why Nations Fail was such a great book. I actually recommended it in another thread a few days ago.

I didn't know Acemoglu got the Nobel Economics Prize.

Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming | Nick Hanauer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2gO4DKVpa8

It also depends on what being in the bottom 50% gives you a claim on.

If you have no net wealth, but a Scandinavian-style social safety net (not just retirement income, but healthcare, free access to arts/culture/parks and so on), you can still live a good life.

"Does the 80th percentile have an outsize claim on lifelong wellbeing relative to the 20th percentile" is a better metric than just looking at bank balances.

Also have to consider age effects, to what extent people move naturally up and down through the centiles through early and late working life and retirement. Looking at net wealth centiles in isolation doesn't tell you very much about how a society works.

From a socital stability point of view, i think it still matters. Too much inequality (especially when combined with lack of class mobility) leads to class resentment which is bad for sociatal stability. Humans get jealous even if their wealth increased in absolute terms.

Rough (not absolute) wealth equality is a goal in and of itself we want a capitalist economic system to function.

Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.

I was actually surprised it's this high (more equal than I expected). But then I clicked the article and of course the title failed to mention that it's top 10% in the US

It's not a slight drift, it's a massive change since the 1950's.

Looking at averages is completely irrelevant when talking about inequality.

Here's a video from 12 years ago: Wealth Inequality in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM