The 16,000 families comprising the richest 0.01%, or “1% of the 1%,” now control 11.2% of total wealth—that's over half the wealth of the rest of the 1%.
Thus, as an educated man concerned with the health and longevity of the nation's economy, it is my perspective this scenario is a ridiculously inefficient use of capital. Therefore it is no surprise the only people who argue against this perspective are those holding the resources (re: Mitt Romney). To wit:
So demographically, older workers have not saved enough for retirement. That drives them to maintain employment. With a lack of job opportunities (the slack), the youngest generations are presented a significant challenge – with amongst the highest debt levels and least job prospects, the youth cohort entering its first (or prime) earning years can be paired with another observed phenomenon, that of the wealth disparity. As a premise, poor people and young people spend aggressively, wealthy households invest and don’t spend proportionally to their means, and a significant number of older Americans have no retirement savings to speak of, and therefore cannot spend proportional to offset their declining economic contribution. Essentially, this is a perfect recipe to grind an economy to a halt: Wealthy people don’t spend, elderly workers don’t spend, poor people and young people love to spend but can’t without reasonable access to funding.
Hi, Federal Reserve, is it comfy in between that rock and hard place? Didn't think so. Ineffectual bunch of elites.
I never know what to make of numbers like those, because the articles that present them never offer anything to tell me what a good wealth distribution would be. With nothing to compare to, I have no idea if those numbers are showing something is wrong, or showing that things are fine.
In any group (the whole population, or any subgroup such as the top 1%) where the are wealth differences within the group, then it is mathematically inevitable that the top X% of the group will have more than X% of the group's wealth.
If there is an individual who has more wealth than any other individual, then it is also mathematically necessary that wealth_of_top(X)/X increases as X decreases.
One thing you could do is look at history. The Economist article has a nice slider graph at the top, but what they expect you to know is how the US economy was doing across the 20th Century.
In general, but not exclusively, growth in the share of wealth by the 90% is correlated to growth of the overall economy and good times for all.
This. Also, it is not the top that matters, rather the quality of life of the bottom percentiles. We need to raise those up, and as long as we can do that, the top doesn't really matter.
True, but I think if we look around, we can find some fairly compelling evidence that we're not doing very well at raising the quality of life of the bottom percentiles...
Comments
The full article is here: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129...
The 16,000 families comprising the richest 0.01%, or “1% of the 1%,” now control 11.2% of total wealth—that's over half the wealth of the rest of the 1%.
Thus, as an educated man concerned with the health and longevity of the nation's economy, it is my perspective this scenario is a ridiculously inefficient use of capital. Therefore it is no surprise the only people who argue against this perspective are those holding the resources (re: Mitt Romney). To wit:
So demographically, older workers have not saved enough for retirement. That drives them to maintain employment. With a lack of job opportunities (the slack), the youngest generations are presented a significant challenge – with amongst the highest debt levels and least job prospects, the youth cohort entering its first (or prime) earning years can be paired with another observed phenomenon, that of the wealth disparity. As a premise, poor people and young people spend aggressively, wealthy households invest and don’t spend proportionally to their means, and a significant number of older Americans have no retirement savings to speak of, and therefore cannot spend proportional to offset their declining economic contribution. Essentially, this is a perfect recipe to grind an economy to a halt: Wealthy people don’t spend, elderly workers don’t spend, poor people and young people love to spend but can’t without reasonable access to funding.
Hi, Federal Reserve, is it comfy in between that rock and hard place? Didn't think so. Ineffectual bunch of elites.
I never know what to make of numbers like those, because the articles that present them never offer anything to tell me what a good wealth distribution would be. With nothing to compare to, I have no idea if those numbers are showing something is wrong, or showing that things are fine.
In any group (the whole population, or any subgroup such as the top 1%) where the are wealth differences within the group, then it is mathematically inevitable that the top X% of the group will have more than X% of the group's wealth.
If there is an individual who has more wealth than any other individual, then it is also mathematically necessary that wealth_of_top(X)/X increases as X decreases.
One thing you could do is look at history. The Economist article has a nice slider graph at the top, but what they expect you to know is how the US economy was doing across the 20th Century.
In general, but not exclusively, growth in the share of wealth by the 90% is correlated to growth of the overall economy and good times for all.
This. Also, it is not the top that matters, rather the quality of life of the bottom percentiles. We need to raise those up, and as long as we can do that, the top doesn't really matter.
True, but I think if we look around, we can find some fairly compelling evidence that we're not doing very well at raising the quality of life of the bottom percentiles...