The url should be changed to: <a href="https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/if-poor-people-knew-how-rich-rich-people-are-there-would-be-riots-in-the-streets/" rel="nofollow">https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/if-poor-people-knew-ho...</a><p>Also, like Piketty said in his book, this trend could be inversed and stabilized if we had more taxes on capital, that's literally the solution to world hunger / education / healthcare.
> “If we take out housing and pensions [which in another part of the article we observe 'those two categories comprise most of the so-called wealth of most Americans'] and calculate just the shares of financial or business wealth — and, thus, equities, fixed-income claims, and business assets — the degree of inequality is much, much worse.<p>So, if we take out the first two elements of the American dream and likely the first two items that Americans save for, which we've discovered represent most of the wealth of the middle and upper middle class, we find that the remaining wealth is even more unequal.<p>Well, duh...
The actual claim seems to be: inequality looks much more extreme if instead of comparing people's total wealth you compute their wealth <i>minus</i> housing and pensions.<p>I dare say that's true, but I don't see any good reason why you should do the comparison that way. (Other than a desire to make the figures look more extreme, I guess.)<p>Suppose Alice has $500k in pension funds, a house worth $400k, and $100k in ordinary non-retirement savings. And suppose Bob has $100k in pension funds, rents rather than owns his house (a similar one to Alice's), and has $900k in ordinary non-retirement savings.<p>Apparently Ruccio wants us to consider Bob much richer than Alice, because he has $900k in non-housing non-pension wealth whereas Alice only has $100k of that. But their real situations are extremely similar, and most likely Alice is actually better off because her pension funds will be subject to less tax.
Wait, what? If poor people knew .... ?!<p>There were riots in England in 2011. There has been rioting in the US.<p>Usually this rioting is kicked off by police brutality, but it seems to me that it quickly descends into looting.