Inequality is off the charts in western civilization. There is a bigger wealth divide now then in the times of the robber Barons of oil and train.<p>Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical.<p>It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control.<p>The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.
I feel this big time. I'm in the top 10% of income earners in Canada and yet me and my family are stuck in a small one bed apartment. We can't buy property as everything in the area would leave us very house poor, if we even qualify for the mortgage.
Pretty surprised at the difference in income in UK vs USA.
Top 10% in UK according to this article is 59,200 pounds [~$76,000] while in the US to enter the top 10% you need to make ~$173k. This is a very large difference. While I know that the UK provides certain benefits related to health care above what the US does I cannot think this comes close to $100k per year. The average cost of a house in the US is ~436k [which is insane] and the average cost of a house in the UK is $372k which again is pretty expensive.<p>Not really sure where I am going with this except to express surprise at what appears to be a massive wealth discrepancy between the US and what I had long considered its closest comparable economy. I had never really done the research though thus my surprise.
Three years ago, Tom Scott made a road trip visualization of a billion dollars: <a href="https://piped.video/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://piped.video/watch?v=8YUWDrLazCg</a><p>Around the same time this rice visualization went viral:
<a href="https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://piped.video/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw</a>
I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights?<p>This is their thesis:<p>> The focus of this book is on the larger group between the 1% and the 10%. These are the managers and professionals of our media, business, the third sector, political parties and academia and are just as influential. However, many would not recognise themselves as high earners at all. In fact, earning around £60,000 a year in Britain places you in the top 10% of income earners. Maybe you’re surprised you fall into this category, or are not as far off as you thought. But despite this group’s relative advantage and comfort, these high earners don’t feel politically empowered. They worry about their income and are anxious about the future.<p>Uh, yes? Aren't these just trite observations? Professionals who earn somewhat higher than average salaries live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars and go on nicer holidays but they are still stuck working for a paycheck like almost everybody else.<p>I get the impression the authors badly wanted to write a book about about income inequality, a subject they feel strongly about, and then tried (and failed) to come up with something fresh to say.<p>The meta point here is that academia has become fiercely competitive and that's why you see books like these getting written. CV padding by people desperate for tenure. I sympathize, but also wonder if we need yet another book rehashing arguments about wealth and income inequality.
I always struggle with conversations around income percentile as the implicit assumption in most cases is that they are pretty static (I.e. that a person at the top, middle, bottom of the scale remains there consistently).<p>The statistic I’d me more interested in is cumulative earnings adjusted for age + untaxed transfers/benefits (e.g. inheritance or public pension benefits).
The points the article raises are completely moot.<p>>Meanwhile, traditionally upper-middle class professions such as law, medicine and academia are threatened by automation, precarisation and increased competition in globalised labour markets.<p>Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy.<p>The New Zurich Newspaper had a very sobering article on how academia is loosing it's last edge, that of gatekeeping higher paid jobs in a globalized economy. A degree used to be an effective showstopper for upwards mobility, because not many could afford one. This might be europe specific, but conditions for undergrads from the middle class were abhorrent up until the mid 80s here in europe.<p>The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.<p>> The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status.<p>Because of the environment created by their parent generation. They're the ones pushing for ever more "professionalization" your honor! Where my parent's could have gone into the field I want to get into without a degree at my age, I have to graduate in order to attain any respect.
Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, cited in the article, remains a fundamental resource for understanding how we got here. It's really essential reading. Given all that, the solutions presented in his later books appear to be inevitable. As for whether we're in a new Gilded Age, I'd say the we're way past that: it's more like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh.
I just realized that the top 10% in the UK is what a software engineer earns in... Poland.<p>Sometimes it is good to realize that those of us who work in tech are privileged.
Nothing new here.<p>Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London.<p>I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio.<p>All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.
The relatively well off can't even keep a server online.<p>Silly article. It's basically claiming that since even the relatively well off are not doing so great nowadays due to inflation, etc. they may appreciate some wealth redistribution (to those even poorer) because they now understand inequality. (The article authors also imply inequality will lead to a revolt, aka. the stick).<p>Yeah, sure! You can bet the relatively well off which are feeling the economic heat will just <i>love</i> to pay more taxes and plunge even more rapidly on the economic ladder.
It’s like they read this and wrote a book on it.<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...</a>
This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else. This may be a comforting thought to some people but it is also not a defensible position. It doesn't hold logically and as far as I recall all the major religions discourage thinking that way - likely because it leads to bad outcomes.<p>Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work. We've seen how that plays out - the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues.<p>The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is much harder to game and also fairer.
What annoys me is that this becomes a simple accounting question. Inequality has only soared like this to the extent that we mark asset portfolios to market rather than to book. Somebody agrees to pay a bit more for a TSLA share and suddenly Musk's net worth has "increased" by a billion dollars, but he owns at the end of the day exactly what he owned at the start of the day.<p>If we just marked assets to book instead (which makes some sense because there's no way most whales could <i>actually</i> liquidate their holdings at their current price) the world's inequality would plummet.
Please stop focusing on inequality. What matters is whether the quality of life for the most impoverished is increasing or decreasing.<p>Consider: would you rather increase the standard of living of the poorest by 2x if it meant also increasing it for the richest by 100x (increasing inequality) or would you rather decrease the standard of living of the richest by 100x and also the poorest by 2x (decreasing inequality). A lot of discourse around inequality seriously proposes the latter (out of ignorance rather than malice).
Amazing how low the "top 3%" is in the UK: £104,000 8-/<p>That wouldn't be in the top 10% in the US.<p>Inequality is skyrocketing, and the "labour" party has become tory, not even "tory light"...
Have a look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_wealth_inequality" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...</a><p>The top unequal countries according to wealth Gini 2019:<p>1. Netherlands
2. Russia
3. Sweden
4. United States
5. Brazil
6. Ukraine
7. Thailand
8. Denmark
9. Philippines
10. Saudi Arabia
I don't think anyone doubts thy staggering inequality.<p>But what do you do about it? Especially in America the rich are those in power, so they're not going to shift the needle against themselves.
I'm sure it's simply because almost everyone lives off unreported, cash income. Let's be honest: 60K per year is poverty, it's picking between living in a place without roaches vs eating out in a crappy place once per week. UK is not a poor country.<p>I know plenty of people earning around a median wage but no one who actually lives on that little. When you get median wage, or two, or three, you still need someone else to pay your bills.<p>My employees get 2-4x median wages and they do NOT live on that money alone (almost all of them moonlight elsewhere), and they are almost all struggling.<p>I am far in top 1% and when i saw what is the asking rent now i said to myself - "wow if i had to move now, that'll be a predicament". Ask any landlord if they are getting paid through the bank. Many won't even accept bank payment. They are paid in cash - and that cash hasn't been in the bank since many circulation loops ago. People are not poor. They are buying everything like crazy, economy is running so hot it can blow up any moment. They just don't report the money they make.