When do people stop comparing what they have to what other people have? When will people stop looking at their “share” of the national wealth, as though income were a pie that should be evenly divided up among all people? And when will people understand that the “bottom 50%” or “top 10%” are not a solid block of people that grow richer or poorer over time, but a statistical grouping that consists of different people over different years?
When people stop caring about equality.
When will people stop looking at their “share” of the national wealth, as though income were a pie that should be evenly divided up among all people?
When people stop wanting more wealth.
And when will people understand that the “bottom 50%” or “top 10%” are not a solid block of people that grow richer or poorer over time, but a statistical grouping that consists of different people over different years?
When the statistics stop changing over time - for the worse.
When it stops being at their expense, as it has been since the 1970’s.
Do you want to go back and live in the 1970’s?
I liked the 70’s. Didn’t seem to bad.
I’d happily see the income structure of the 1970’s.
I just got a raise at work. Should I be happy about it, or should I first find out how much of a raise every other person got? After all, if things became more unequal because the CEO got a bigger raise, I should be upset, right?
It’s possible to have more wealth, yet still have a smaller “slice of the pie.”
Every morning I go into my local grocery store, and there is always a line of people. Based on my polling, the person at the front of the line is always happy, and the people in the back of the line are always annoyed. Every time I come in, there’s always someone at the back of the line! Why doesn’t the store ever take care of that group, the back-of-the-line people? Why do they always show favoritism towards the privileged group at the front of the line? Every day, the people are always at the back of the line. When will things ever improve for them??
If your CEO got a raise despite driving the company into the ground, then you should be upset.
It’s possible to have more wealth, yet still have a smaller “slice of the pie.”
As Montgomery Burns said, “I would give all my wealth away, in exchange for just a little more.”
Like I said, when people are satisfied with the amount of wealth they have, they will stop worrying about everyone else.
Every day, the people are always at the back of the line. When will things ever improve for them??
Not today, and not tomorrow. Because the only thing the store sells is tickets to tomorrow’s line.
Really? You think that analogy holds? Society is not like a line in a grocery store. A line is equal. Everyone moves up at a measured pace and gets served equally. Society is not like that. In society, things are not equal or fair at all. The bottom scrounges and fights and sacrifices in ways that the top doesn’t even comprehend. Merit, intelligence, hard work, ethics, integrity, none of that matters. Watch an episode of “The Real Housewives of …” or a Kardashian show (there are at least three on now) and tell me why and how their vast wealth is based on any of those things.
Middle class income has actually decreased. So naturally when they see that one group of people is making even more money than before and is at the same time pushing to reduce their tax rates and eliminate the estate tax, thus permanently enshrining advantages for generations to come, they think that there is no longer a sense of fair play in this country. Therefore they are upset.
If the tax rates hadn’t been considerably reduced and there was a sense that government money was being used to raise all boats, then there would probably be less anger. But support to ensure every American has a reasonable chance at becoming a success is way down, at the same time the wealthier are not only becoming wealthier on their own merits, but are also using the political system to further increase their share of the gains. Tax rates have been cut to their lowest level on the rich, while at the same time support for things like public universities are at an all time low.
As far as your other comment goes:
Inter-generational income mobility is not doing particularly well in this country either, and the Republicans are doing everything in their power to keep mobility down. Increasing access to college, for example, would have a huge impact on income mobility, but instead access is getting cut off so that the wealthy can pay even less in taxes than they did before. That’s particularly problematic given that we already have amongst the lowest taxes in the industrial world.
America has actually slipped behind Europe in terms of inter-generational income mobility.
[M]any researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.
…
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints.
Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.
Despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62 percent of Americans (male and female) raised in the top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths, according to research by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Similarly, 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths.
I was making a humorous comparison, but yes, many of the people at “the top” were at “the bottom” at some point in their lives. In fact, a lot of the inequality that people complain about is due to differences in age. Because believe it or not, a person who has worked for twenty or thirty or forty years generally has a higher net worth than someone in their 20s. It’s not that those people get preferential treatment; it’s just that they’ve been in line longer.
I wouldn’t look at the lifestyles of a few ridiculously wealthy with no visible job skills, and assume that that applies to the majority of wealthy people.
Here’s some graphs from some recent research I have been doing (all derived myself from tax return data processed by Piketty & Saez):
Here’s another that further aggregates the second graph. Notice the value for the bottom 90% over 1980-2010, and how the reality for most americans are not reflected in the macro mean data.
Why is it that when people want to make arguments about inequality, they all use the exact same Piketty-Saez study? A quick Google search will find numerous criticisms of that study, but a good one is here.
What happened structurally to financial law in the late 70s to do that? Or is it entirely a corporate culture type of thing? I wouldn’t have been surprised to find something like that originating in the late 80s or so, but I’m surprised to see it seemingly originate in the mid to late 70s instead.
Asian manufacturing is what happened. The divergence begins at the 73-74 oil shock/recession, which marked the first big influx of Japanese made autos.
It’s reputable, and a number of academics have used the same methodology for a number of other countries (see World Top Incomes Database). I’m sure there are criticisms, and after handling the data myself for a couple of papers it does indeed have shortcomings (not from the authors but from the data source), but we live in an imperfect world.
To test whether I was getting outlandish results in those graphs I put the top 5% income series generated by this Piketty & Saez data with official US Census Bureau data from household surveys (this is all real income), here is the outcome:
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to prove. Of course the graphs are similar, because Piketty-Saez used numbers from the Census Bureau, which is precisely the problem. They used census numbers, instead of using IRS numbers which more accurately show the distribution of income within households. Again, just read any of the many, many criticisms of that study, which show the flaws in the data set.
Very arguable, actually - http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/12/49170449.pdf
“However, evidence as to the role of globalisation in growing inequality is mixed. A number of international cross-country studies find trade integration to have increased inequality in both high-wage and low-wage countries, which is at odds with traditional trade theory”
The turn-around of capital from a decreasing to an increasing share of income against wages is not so easily hand-waved away. Financial regulation is indeed a very likely culprit given the time-scale.
Andy - Never mind that the same thing is seen in data, collected in various ways, across virtually every country in the world.
Err, their estimates are from tax returns, not household surveys. You have it mixed around. Why don’t you enlighten me on specific problems that compromise the integrity of the results, im starting to think you aren’t even familiar with what they did you just don’t like the answer.