The ‘semi-rich’: Millions of high-income Americans may not feel wealthy but are

&quot;The net worth of that group ranges from about $1.2 million to $20 million per household, Stewarts says. Those assets include cash savings and investments, as well as real estate. Many members of the 9.9% don’t feel enormously wealthy but they are still doing better than the vast majority of the country.&quot;<p>A household with $1.2M in assets does not belong to the same group as a household with $20M in assets.

The problem really comes down to security. Unless you have 10+ million in the bank, you are probably at a non zero risk of having one of the following occur<p>- unable to retire&#x2F;aged out of the workforce<p>- lose house<p>- lose job and unable to find replacement.<p>- unable to afford living in your area.<p>- broken by medical bill&#x2F;disaster.<p>- unable to afford education&#x2F;childcare for children<p>My partner and I work in well known tech companies, but don’t come from money - we are well off as long as one of us doesn’t get a bad performance review and there isn’t a crash.<p>It’ll be decades if ever when I have the financial security to consider myself wealthy.

After reading this, it feels like a piece designed to get working class people to fight amongst themselves vs. the actual billionaires. Like 20 Million is a HUGE AMOUNT but that&#x27;s 5x less than 100M, and 50X less than a billion. 50X

Educated, have good jobs, own a single-family house, pay for their kids&#x27; college, save money for retirement – in any other country&#x2F;culture this category would be known as &quot;middle class&quot;.<p>I fall into this 9.9% as well, so someone please tell me where I can exert this &quot;Aristocratic influence&quot; I have.

&quot;The net worth of that group ranges from about $1.2 million to $20 million per household, Stewarts says.&quot;<p>In Australia apparently all you have to do to get into this group would be to actually own a paid off house. :&#x2F; I think this says far more about housing then wealth inequality though.

Maybe it&#x27;s a regional thing but I feel like there are some pretty big caricaturisations is this piece.<p>On meritocracy:<p>&quot;I think a defining feature of the group culturally is this belief in meritocracy, in the sense merit is what makes the economy work. The sum total of our GDP is the sum total of the individuals in it.&quot;<p>Nothing too controversial...<p>&quot;Everyone earns what their merit is worth.&quot;<p>I feel like this only works in a very technical sense and doesn&#x27;t translate to what people would mean using natural language. Merit is a morally loaded term which I think makes the whole debate over Meritocracy confusing. A better way to put this would be:<p>1. Individuals have different amounts of leverage, which is correlated to earnings. 2. Competency is non-trivial and significant source of leverage. 3. A person with competency has more leverage than a person without competency all things being equal.<p>&quot;That is coupled with a market myth that says that whatever people do that earns money is essentially good for society.&quot;<p>Perhaps there are people that believe this, but they must be a small group of people. Everyone everywhere complains about the knock-on effects of different industries.<p>It&#x27;s not clear to me where they are drawing these conclusions from.

I&#x27;d say the author of the article doesn&#x27;t have a very good grasp of this concept.<p>There is a <i>vast</i> difference between, as she says, &quot;1.2 million&quot; and &quot;20 million.&quot;<p>20 million is &quot;screw you&quot; money. In that someone could quit everything they do, and live their whole life very comfortably on the wealth they have in hand, by paying cash for their house, setting aside a million in rainy day money, and putting the rest into very low risk bonds.<p>1.2 million is just enough money to get someone in trouble if they make a few mistakes. Buy an expensive house in the wrong place? Not a millionaire anymore. Ill-timed stock returns that turn south around the first of the year? Not a millionaire anymore. Try to start another business that doesn&#x27;t pan out? Not a millionaire anymore. There&#x27;s a million ways (pun intended) for someone with 1.2 million dollars to find themselves fast running out of money. Someone with 20 million? Not so much.

Well they are in circles where they feel decidedly poor. Just see the excesses in the Bay area and come out feeling real poor even if you are in the 1% income bracket. Of course everything is relative and you might need 50 years income to buy a place that would be considered awful in Iowa.

Another article talking about the same thing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;the-goods&#x2F;22673605&#x2F;upper-middle-class-meritocracy-matthew-stewart" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;the-goods&#x2F;22673605&#x2F;upper-middle-class-me...</a><p>The interesting point that this one misses is that the children of this class are often not counted as part of the 9.9%, but are effectively part of it nonetheless because of the backstop an benefits that the 9.9% confer onto them. And their beliefs, etc. are pretty well in line with the 9.9. So really, it&#x27;s more like the top 20% that&#x27;s in this category, even though it doesn&#x27;t look like it on paper.

&quot;Most members of the 9.9% also talk about the amazing virtues of education and go out and build these systems where the educated will succeed. Then we have a system of financing college where a large majority of people have to buy that. They have to buy that behavior or life pattern.<p>It’s like someone manages to jump across a pit of fire and get to the other side and then convinces everyone else they should do the same thing. Unfortunately, statistically, those following that model are not all going to succeed. It does not make sense to have a society that is either defaulting on student debt or they are so burdened by it they can’t buy houses or take other important steps in life.&quot;<p>The path of getting a good, useful education, making decent life decisions, and slowly building up wealth over time via real estate? Ya, that will work for most people. The jump over that fire pit is pretty short. And while some people can&#x27;t jump at all, a lot can.

1. Take the top n=10% of net worths<p>2. Shave off the most extreme outliers at the top<p>3. Give this group a catchy name and attribute values to them<p>4. Make enough money off of pop-sociology to be included in this group<p>5. Repeat with n=n&#x2F;2

Where do people live that think having 1.2M in assets is no big deal? Where I live you&#x27;re making big money if you make 80K a year.

I checked once and seemingly I belonged to the richest 10% of Germany. Didn&#x27;t feel that way.

Related fact: the US &quot;poverty line&quot; is at the 80th percentile of world incomes. If you&#x27;re not &quot;US poor&quot;, you&#x27;re in the top 20%.

The book&#x27;s title full tells you a lot:<p>&quot;The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture.&quot;<p>No examples of policy, law, or any specifics how this group is &quot;entrenching inequality&quot;. This is more reductive single factor race blaming. Nothing regarding how many of the 9.9% inherited this class status, so how is this an Aristocracy?<p>Demonizing merit seems like a terrible strategy for a society.

When a healthcare bill could bankrupt you easily, hard to feel secure with even millions in the bank. Americans are right to feel exposed.

&gt;How does the 9.9% vary across racial lines? The numbers are not very precise. White people make up about 90% of the 9.9%, which is not at all representative of the total. It’s not all white but much more white than the rest of the population.<p>Whites are 72% of the population so 90% falls pretty close to what we would expect to begin with. It seems an <i>awful</i> lot like the author was digging for any &quot;us vs them&quot; that they could find. Seeing as that the author of the book being reviewed and the author of the article are both shameless leftist shills according to their respective Twitter accounts, I feel comfortable sorting this article into the propaganda bin.

It’s time to start a wealth tax on 401k values.

Hey, look -- the 0.1% are seeing tax proposals on their radar that might actually land on them for once. Quick, to the propaganda cannons! Deflect those taxes, make sure they land on the upper middle class instead, like the last 10 times this happened!

Article seems confused about the difference between &#x27;wealth&#x27; and &#x27;income&#x27;.<p>It has to be tough trying to write about complicated topics while staying under a &#x27;fourth grade reading comprehension&#x27; ceiling, or whatever the target is.<p>How confusing the world is when you have to stick to the &#x27;ten hundred&#x27; most common words and concepts. (ten-hundred from XKCD)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;thing-explainer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;thing-explainer&#x2F;</a>

Socialist busybodies, always concerning themselves with what others spent their time earning, in fear of a situation where normal people have anything of value for too long…<p>It&#x27;s always so important to convince each cohort of the population that every step of the ladder above them is absolutely crushing it, probably at their cohort&#x27;s expense, and they probably deserve to be taxed harder.<p>After all, what other business does anyone have judging how well others live?<p>Meanwhile, acorns has raised over $100 million from Black Rock, celebrities, NBC Universal, etc.