To argue that this is purely meritocratic requires you to argue that some individuals are thousands to tens to even hundreds of thousands of times more productive, intelligent, or hard-working than everyone else.<p>While differences do exist, framing the question that way makes it obvious that the <i>very highest</i> levels of the income ladder are largely a result of network effects and leverage rather than productive activity.<p>Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee?<p>I'm starting to see the rise of "market fundamentalism" over the past 35-ish years as part of the general trend toward the naturalistic fallacy over the same time period. If it's "natural," it's by definition good. So if the "natural" free market concentrates >50% of all wealth in <0.1% of hands, well dag nabbit that's what nature obviously intended and who are you to argue with nature? Wealth redistribution or other mitigating strategies are sort of like vaccination and GMO foods-- tampering with nature and "playing God."
The full article is here: <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631129...</a><p>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%.
The biggest lie told today is that we have less wealth in the world and we can't afford things like social security and welfare. There is more wealth now than there has ever been. Modern productivity is insanely high.
I recommend this NPR podcast, you'd be surprised by the results.<p>"INCOME INEQUALITY IMPAIRS THE AMERICAN DREAM OF UPWARD MOBILITY"<p><a href="http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1159-income-inequality-impairs-the-american-dream" rel="nofollow">http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1...</a>
The worst implication I see find (reading between the lines and via the graphs) is that our middle class consists of only 9.9% of the population. By subtraction, the middle class holds around 56% of the country's assets.<p>So our middle class is indeed shrinking but also moving towards being upper class.
I'd be very interested to see the impact of baby boomers on the distribution of wealth.<p>Remember: (1) wealth tends to be correlated with age and (2) baby boomers make up a much larger percentage of the population (i.e. age distribution is not equal).<p>If you have a large bolus of folks moving through their careers, the graph follows the typical wealth trajectory. Right now, baby boomers are at or near the peak of their wealth.
The webpage for the paper (!) has more information: <a href="http://gabriel-zucman.eu/uswealth/" rel="nofollow">http://gabriel-zucman.eu/uswealth/</a><p>There's also a slide deck for a talk on the paper: <a href="http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf</a>
I find it hard to take this sort of analysis seriously, when the authors admit that they don't even understand the order of magnitude of the error bars on the data.<p>Not to mention that the regulatory landscape has changed over time, and since that directly influences several classes of errors (from waiters under-reporting tips to "the 1%" hiding money in now-illegal tax shelters) estimating historical trends is an exercise in futility.<p>And we effectively have no way to benchmark how well these different studies are doing at measuring the underlying phenomena that they're trying to measure, this is really just making up numbers and calling it "wealth distribution".
It is interesting that OP uses a line meant to denigrate socialism to critique capitalism. I think that the graph is misleading - the average poor person today has 3 wide screen TVs, an Xbox, a smart phone and air conditioning. Poor people in 1916 would sometimes starve during the winters. To compare 1916 to 2014 as if they are equal highs in inequality is meaningless: Overall, everybody is much, much better off.