humans worry a lot about how society probably gets run by a little group of rich elites.
but when longstanding gatopal™ econ professor mark perry came to lecture at kittengarten, he showed us some graphs that make this seem maybe sort of specious.
more people than ever are rich! (though it took a little whoopsy-doo last year for covid)
and it seems like most people get a turn at some point! it’s not even always the same people in these buckets!
but i think that still many humans really have sense they are being treated unfairly and like some sort of underclass.
do you think that maybe it’s stuff like this that does it?
(because i can kind of see how this would make people mad…)
I bring in 125k to 150k as a software developer (without having to go into management) with 4 kids and one of them is T1D (really expensive). We still save half our income. Yes, I would consider myself rich. Having grown up with two parents working and always pinching pennies I feel like I'm at the top of the world. Also, I'm very grateful that my wife can stay home with the kids and teach them at home so they don't turn into communists like so many people do now days.
But leftists are taking over in many places, even more in high tech, software development companies.
Leftists gain control/majority using hirings, workplace practices and services to filter out dissenting voices, they have done that in Universities for years.
What will happen if they force you to participate in an anti-racist seminary, or a seminary to decrease your "whiteness"?
I work for a company that has conservative leadership. There are some people that lean to the left including my Marxist manager who I chewed out about his politics. Luckily he is a laid back guy and isn't going to fire me - well, he couldn't because I would have the CTO on him.
Many companies are rejecting the Woke though - even left leaning work places like Basecamp - they laid off 33% of their workforce. And then Coinbase laid off a bunch of people because they were Woke. The Woke are so destructive that eventually they need to be fired.
Yes, I would have no problem quitting with a place that forced anti-racist indoctrination. I might go to them first and be disruptive. Having FU money has its perks :-). Gotta pinch those pennies so no one can own you.
Soon-to-be Tweeted and cited. One of the things that I find most troubling about the whole "eat the rich" point-of-view, is that it is so often held by people who are, pretty much objectively, rich in comparison to almost the entire freaking world! Then again, a central tenet of Marxism would seem to be jealousy of those who have more, no matter how much you have yourself, no?
True. I’m stuck for now in the Bay Area and $100k makes you not very rich here (a shitty one bedroom runs $2k a month, daycare for an infant around $2.7k - it is sheer insanity around here). Most other places are rather great at the same income level.
More than half the population resides in major cities. I guess my point is that the elites (the ones who control things) piss away more than $100K in a month. 99% of the people don't make $700K, and speaking as someone n the top 1%, I assure you, I don't control anything. It's the people in the top 1% of my class that do.
I don’t wish to assert that social mobility is not possible here. However, the opening paragraph asserts that our society is not run by a little group of elites. It is. The people who run this country are the people who can spend the median income on a night out and not notice.
our society is not run by the rich 1% or even the top 10% of that 1%.
the power is not concentrated in the wealthy. it's concentrated in the politically connected. we've developed a serious oligarch class that's getting goodies the rest of us are not.
and i know enough of them to see the difference.
the endless claims that the middle class is dying and the "1%" need to "pay more" are just part of the canon they use to hide where the real privilege is.
spend some time with the politicians and media barons and it gets awfully glaring.
the people who run the country are not the guys dropping $20k a nite on hotel rooms and 3k on bottles on st barths. they're the ones in cheap suits in the corridors of the capitol aspiring to be the next big gun committee head or climbing the greasy pole at bureaucracies.
you think mark cuban has more power than tony fauci or some no one like walensky these days?
because it doesn't look like it.
wanna see most billionaires wet their pants? send the justice department. (musk is, admittedly, an outlier, (at least to the US govt) but look how fast zuck backed off politics and learned to get back in line and play ball.)
being rich ain't enough.
as government gets more powerful, privilege accrues to those in its orbit and being merely wealthy gets you less and less.
Amazingly to me, the large social-justice driven class is simultaneously envious and personally ambitious, yet seem to serve as foot soldiers for the war on stability and agency. Comfortable yet want and claim victim status.
The national median income is low. In places like San Francisco, $100,000 is not above poverty for a family of four. The minimum income to be in the top 1% (the elites) is $758,434.
san francisco is a city of city of 870k in a country of 330 million.
and it's really expensive.
this is the price of stupid, socialist and crony capitalist policies. adjusted for cost of living, california is the highest poverty rate state in the US.
Socialists: everyone deserves not to be "poor" even in the richest, most expensive city in the U.S. and if they are "poor" then it's proof of America's Grand Failure and we need to fix it. The one thing that should never happen is that they move somewhere else.
let's do everything we can to make permitting, zoning, and construction all but impossible to be sure that supply of homes can never expand in response to demand.
ever try building something in san francisco? i don't recommend it.
There's plenty of new housing in Mission Bay. That said, I'm totally in favor of selling and dozing the entirety of Golden Gate Park. More a glorified community college campus + burglary playground than a proper "park," and the Presidio is next door anyway. Doesn't matter - the city is doomed to be the next Detroit.
Ah but Gavin and the illustrious state Assembly and Senate have just proclaimed that they will overrule ALL local zoning laws to make any residential property capable of being a fourplex or more, subject to some very limited restrictions. That will solve everything make good and DAMN sure no one ever has to leave Paradise.
By default people, human beings, are poor. It takes a pretty well developed economy to have the level of luxury most americans have (even some of the poorest ones).
In the natural state, people are poor, as you can see on any underdeveloped african country where the majority of the population lives from subsistence agriculture.
Yes yes yes. The whole peninsula, Marin county, and parts of the east bay are just as bad. If I wasn’t tethered by a custody agreement to this area I would be long gone for all those reasons!!!!
This is so silly. First of all AEI is a far-right "think-tank" funded by billionaires in order to sell supply-side economics to the American public, thus their data and methodology should be viewed with a skeptical eye. Secondly, being rich is not the same as having a high income (and $100k is not necessarily a high income for reasons mentioned by others.) One can hypothetically have an income of $0 a year or even a negative income over a prolonged period of time and be in the top 0.00001% of wealth. A high income for a given period of time represents the potentiality of accumulating wealth (and thus becoming rich) but it is not the same as being rich. If one had to go heavily into debt in order to attain high-income job this is certainly a mitigating factor in that regard. When one looks at wealth inequality as represented by net-worth I think the picture will be much more stark than income inequality. As for the 70% spending a year as "high-income" earners this is most likely due to one-off events like selling a home: it seems highly dubious that people are constantly zig-zagging from income bracket to income bracket as implied. Furthermore this data pertains only to the USA even though the capitalist economy is globalized. Why should I only care about poverty within the borders controlled by the federal government of the United States? There are also numerous other problems with this white-washing of income and wealth inequality in America, as mentioned by other commenters.
And what better litmus test for the insecurity that such indebtedness generates, than a centralized edict promoting a murderous treatment regimen (neglect > remdesivir > ventilator), or healthcare center policies that demand taking and promoting an experimental vaccine and discourage use of VAERS?
Surely enough, the allegedly "high income" physicians of the US have broadly complied; their income is more important than the lives of their fellow citizens. There has been more revolt among nurses, though still not a majority of them.
It isn't income--freedom and power. Most of the upper income group are celestial bodies being sucked into the black holes or power that are comprised of a few thousand people. Only a few private jet accidents would suffice to re-jigger the balance.
It looks like the middle income is disappearing. With current conditions, I think eventually those numbers will end up in the lower income. The people in the upper income, should enjoy it while they have it.
Middle is disappearing into Upper Middle. The result is the same for "working class" men - total cultural obsolescence; no potential access to mid-20th C. community-actualized status / dignity since shortly after the 70s-era veer toward PMC-centric meritocracy. But why should emptying a gross, stupid trashcan garner anybody respect from their community?
The Upper Middle doesn't really have it so great either. Most PMCs toting around USBc-crippled MBPs today can only afford a fraction of the "fellow American labor hours" a middle class family had access to half a century ago; hence all the struggles over child and elder care even in the 6-figures household.
I wasn’t aware that it is a trope. And yes, that is exactly what I am arguing. Rewind time four decades, and “fellow American labor hours” were affordable to the middle class, now they are not affordable to even much of the upper middle class. In part this has to do with the increased demand inflicted by the medicalization of life. But fundamentally it is the visible manifestation of the impoverishment of the working class. The most charitable take possible is that this was inevitable once the hangover of our two-decade post-war export hegemony had to be dealt with, so globalism has been a grand compensation in the form of shifting as many goods possible into foreign labor hours.
Thanks for your comment. I agree that's what it looks like now, but I think the whole upper-middle is becoming the middle and is going to sink. If we let it, there's going to be the 1%ers and the rest of us in the lower income. Just my gut.
people have been saying that for 20 years. yet the opposite keeps happening despite the fact that much of the lower bracket is driven by immigration which constantly refills it.
the us IS having a lot of immigrants come in these days. but these times are not typical of the past 20 years. if enough people don't wake up... i want to thank you for waking people up, gato!!! i also really hope you're right and i'm wrong.
My only issue on the top chart is that 35K to 100K seems too big a range, or perhaps the wrong range. US Median household income is somewhere around 60-65K, so I get that that places it in the middle of this range. But 35K hardly seems like middle class (it's about 17.50/hour wage). Other than that nitpick, it's great data to refute the typical narrative.
One of the primary drivers here is that too many people are 'wealthy'. This makes it hard for the people who view themselves as special to feel suitably distanced from those who they view as not special. Money used to be enough to do this, now it's all about establishing new rituals only shared by the 'in' group.
Forcing masks on the underclass makes it clear who is special, and who is not.
So this is suggesting that basically all middle income earners will at least have one year or more at or above 100k salary. Seem really unlikely without some extraneous outside income unless I’m missing something…
Not only in the USA. its pretty much anti-meritocratic to rely more income taxes (which is a product of YOUR production capacity) than inheritance/donation taxes.
Have you considered the impact of possible manipulation of the inflation numbers? I dont have the grasp of numbers you have, but to my mind ShadowStats makes a pretty convincing case that the US systematically undercounts inflation, so there is apparently a growing disparity between the wealth that stats say exists, vs the more accurate perception of the common people on the street.
(I do not live in the US, so I have no first hand experience, but i have read about this in several places, correct me if wrong)
Yes the redefinition of inflation has been one of the key aspects to the whole thing. When you look at monetary inflation, we double the money supply about every 11 years.
To put this another way, for every $1 in circulation on 9/11 there are now $4 in circulation.
We've seen recently that government has no problem 'juking the stats'. It's just like them to inflate away their promises to those on fixed income but technically keeping them via devalued dollars.
I bring in 125k to 150k as a software developer (without having to go into management) with 4 kids and one of them is T1D (really expensive). We still save half our income. Yes, I would consider myself rich. Having grown up with two parents working and always pinching pennies I feel like I'm at the top of the world. Also, I'm very grateful that my wife can stay home with the kids and teach them at home so they don't turn into communists like so many people do now days.
Good thinking.
But leftists are taking over in many places, even more in high tech, software development companies.
Leftists gain control/majority using hirings, workplace practices and services to filter out dissenting voices, they have done that in Universities for years.
What will happen if they force you to participate in an anti-racist seminary, or a seminary to decrease your "whiteness"?
I work for a company that has conservative leadership. There are some people that lean to the left including my Marxist manager who I chewed out about his politics. Luckily he is a laid back guy and isn't going to fire me - well, he couldn't because I would have the CTO on him.
Many companies are rejecting the Woke though - even left leaning work places like Basecamp - they laid off 33% of their workforce. And then Coinbase laid off a bunch of people because they were Woke. The Woke are so destructive that eventually they need to be fired.
Yes, I would have no problem quitting with a place that forced anti-racist indoctrination. I might go to them first and be disruptive. Having FU money has its perks :-). Gotta pinch those pennies so no one can own you.
Dollars in the bank represent freedom.
Soon-to-be Tweeted and cited. One of the things that I find most troubling about the whole "eat the rich" point-of-view, is that it is so often held by people who are, pretty much objectively, rich in comparison to almost the entire freaking world! Then again, a central tenet of Marxism would seem to be jealousy of those who have more, no matter how much you have yourself, no?
Envy is a control tool in communist countries.
Doesn't it piss you off the neighbors got a new TV and you didn't?
Turn 'em in! That'll show 'em!
And this only occurs in free-market economies.
Capitalism = share the wealth
Socialism = share the misery
$100,000 is not a high income. Please redo it for $500,000.
us personal median income is $36k
it's about 67k for a median family.
100K is a high income almost anyplace outside a major city.
True. I’m stuck for now in the Bay Area and $100k makes you not very rich here (a shitty one bedroom runs $2k a month, daycare for an infant around $2.7k - it is sheer insanity around here). Most other places are rather great at the same income level.
Valid point. I live in relatively rural NC. Our 5 bed/3 bath house on 1.5 acres is < $1k/mo. A $100k salary means living like a king!
Move. Solved.
You can’t move when you have joint custody. You’d have to abandon your kids. Not an option.
More than half the population resides in major cities. I guess my point is that the elites (the ones who control things) piss away more than $100K in a month. 99% of the people don't make $700K, and speaking as someone n the top 1%, I assure you, I don't control anything. It's the people in the top 1% of my class that do.
and most major cities are quite affordable on 100k.
houton, dallas, chicago, phoenix, philly, san antonio, much of LA, even parts of NYC.
you're looking only at the most wildly ovprices and assuming it's typical.
500k is a crazily high figure to use to track social mobility.
that's 99th percentile. (top 1%) (531k is top 1%)
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percentiles/
I don’t wish to assert that social mobility is not possible here. However, the opening paragraph asserts that our society is not run by a little group of elites. It is. The people who run this country are the people who can spend the median income on a night out and not notice.
our society is not run by the rich 1% or even the top 10% of that 1%.
the power is not concentrated in the wealthy. it's concentrated in the politically connected. we've developed a serious oligarch class that's getting goodies the rest of us are not.
and i know enough of them to see the difference.
the endless claims that the middle class is dying and the "1%" need to "pay more" are just part of the canon they use to hide where the real privilege is.
spend some time with the politicians and media barons and it gets awfully glaring.
the people who run the country are not the guys dropping $20k a nite on hotel rooms and 3k on bottles on st barths. they're the ones in cheap suits in the corridors of the capitol aspiring to be the next big gun committee head or climbing the greasy pole at bureaucracies.
you think mark cuban has more power than tony fauci or some no one like walensky these days?
because it doesn't look like it.
wanna see most billionaires wet their pants? send the justice department. (musk is, admittedly, an outlier, (at least to the US govt) but look how fast zuck backed off politics and learned to get back in line and play ball.)
being rich ain't enough.
as government gets more powerful, privilege accrues to those in its orbit and being merely wealthy gets you less and less.
Amazingly to me, the large social-justice driven class is simultaneously envious and personally ambitious, yet seem to serve as foot soldiers for the war on stability and agency. Comfortable yet want and claim victim status.
That’s so unfair. I’m barely struggling along on a million a year.
FICA stops at $132,900. That would be a good threshold level.
Good point. Also, 100k in 1970 does not equate to 100k in 2020.
it's already adjusted for that (inflation). that's what "constant 2020 dollars" means.
100K in adjusted $.
Got it. Thanks.
The national median income is low. In places like San Francisco, $100,000 is not above poverty for a family of four. The minimum income to be in the top 1% (the elites) is $758,434.
sure, but that's hardly relevant to most people.
san francisco is a city of city of 870k in a country of 330 million.
and it's really expensive.
this is the price of stupid, socialist and crony capitalist policies. adjusted for cost of living, california is the highest poverty rate state in the US.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/suppose-you-live-in-americas-most-liberal-state-now-suppose-you-live-in-the-state-known-as-the-poverty-capital-of-america-but-i-repeat-myself/
100k is 66th percentile for households, so if we're splitting high/medium/low that seems like the place to do it. (144k = 80th percentile)
Socialists: everyone deserves not to be "poor" even in the richest, most expensive city in the U.S. and if they are "poor" then it's proof of America's Grand Failure and we need to fix it. The one thing that should never happen is that they move somewhere else.
also socialists:
let's do everything we can to make permitting, zoning, and construction all but impossible to be sure that supply of homes can never expand in response to demand.
ever try building something in san francisco? i don't recommend it.
There's plenty of new housing in Mission Bay. That said, I'm totally in favor of selling and dozing the entirety of Golden Gate Park. More a glorified community college campus + burglary playground than a proper "park," and the Presidio is next door anyway. Doesn't matter - the city is doomed to be the next Detroit.
Ah but Gavin and the illustrious state Assembly and Senate have just proclaimed that they will overrule ALL local zoning laws to make any residential property capable of being a fourplex or more, subject to some very limited restrictions. That will solve everything make good and DAMN sure no one ever has to leave Paradise.
Anti-socialist sociopaths: people deserve to be poor because "the market" is and should be the final arbiter of human worth.
By default people, human beings, are poor. It takes a pretty well developed economy to have the level of luxury most americans have (even some of the poorest ones).
In the natural state, people are poor, as you can see on any underdeveloped african country where the majority of the population lives from subsistence agriculture.
Human failures: people are never EVER responsible for their own destiny.
Yes yes yes. The whole peninsula, Marin county, and parts of the east bay are just as bad. If I wasn’t tethered by a custody agreement to this area I would be long gone for all those reasons!!!!
AEI …. giggle snort. 35k is almost just the same as 100k. Sure. Sure. And those partying at the Emmys only earn 100k … giggle snort
This is so silly. First of all AEI is a far-right "think-tank" funded by billionaires in order to sell supply-side economics to the American public, thus their data and methodology should be viewed with a skeptical eye. Secondly, being rich is not the same as having a high income (and $100k is not necessarily a high income for reasons mentioned by others.) One can hypothetically have an income of $0 a year or even a negative income over a prolonged period of time and be in the top 0.00001% of wealth. A high income for a given period of time represents the potentiality of accumulating wealth (and thus becoming rich) but it is not the same as being rich. If one had to go heavily into debt in order to attain high-income job this is certainly a mitigating factor in that regard. When one looks at wealth inequality as represented by net-worth I think the picture will be much more stark than income inequality. As for the 70% spending a year as "high-income" earners this is most likely due to one-off events like selling a home: it seems highly dubious that people are constantly zig-zagging from income bracket to income bracket as implied. Furthermore this data pertains only to the USA even though the capitalist economy is globalized. Why should I only care about poverty within the borders controlled by the federal government of the United States? There are also numerous other problems with this white-washing of income and wealth inequality in America, as mentioned by other commenters.
And what better litmus test for the insecurity that such indebtedness generates, than a centralized edict promoting a murderous treatment regimen (neglect > remdesivir > ventilator), or healthcare center policies that demand taking and promoting an experimental vaccine and discourage use of VAERS?
Surely enough, the allegedly "high income" physicians of the US have broadly complied; their income is more important than the lives of their fellow citizens. There has been more revolt among nurses, though still not a majority of them.
It isn't income--freedom and power. Most of the upper income group are celestial bodies being sucked into the black holes or power that are comprised of a few thousand people. Only a few private jet accidents would suffice to re-jigger the balance.
It looks like the middle income is disappearing. With current conditions, I think eventually those numbers will end up in the lower income. The people in the upper income, should enjoy it while they have it.
Middle is disappearing into Upper Middle. The result is the same for "working class" men - total cultural obsolescence; no potential access to mid-20th C. community-actualized status / dignity since shortly after the 70s-era veer toward PMC-centric meritocracy. But why should emptying a gross, stupid trashcan garner anybody respect from their community?
The Upper Middle doesn't really have it so great either. Most PMCs toting around USBc-crippled MBPs today can only afford a fraction of the "fellow American labor hours" a middle class family had access to half a century ago; hence all the struggles over child and elder care even in the 6-figures household.
this is mostly a trope.
the "labor hours" is just people living in bigger homes with more appliances, taking more vacations, etc. and needing far fewer "labor hours."
you're basically arguing that because the cost of labor is up, people are poor and ignoring the substitution effects.
I wasn’t aware that it is a trope. And yes, that is exactly what I am arguing. Rewind time four decades, and “fellow American labor hours” were affordable to the middle class, now they are not affordable to even much of the upper middle class. In part this has to do with the increased demand inflicted by the medicalization of life. But fundamentally it is the visible manifestation of the impoverishment of the working class. The most charitable take possible is that this was inevitable once the hangover of our two-decade post-war export hegemony had to be dealt with, so globalism has been a grand compensation in the form of shifting as many goods possible into foreign labor hours.
Thanks for your comment. I agree that's what it looks like now, but I think the whole upper-middle is becoming the middle and is going to sink. If we let it, there's going to be the 1%ers and the rest of us in the lower income. Just my gut.
people have been saying that for 20 years. yet the opposite keeps happening despite the fact that much of the lower bracket is driven by immigration which constantly refills it.
the us IS having a lot of immigrants come in these days. but these times are not typical of the past 20 years. if enough people don't wake up... i want to thank you for waking people up, gato!!! i also really hope you're right and i'm wrong.
Class war has intensified with covid, but been ongoing since forever in the West....
My husband and I always comment on this class spirit which scorts Covid
My only issue on the top chart is that 35K to 100K seems too big a range, or perhaps the wrong range. US Median household income is somewhere around 60-65K, so I get that that places it in the middle of this range. But 35K hardly seems like middle class (it's about 17.50/hour wage). Other than that nitpick, it's great data to refute the typical narrative.
Your final meme there could have had a dozen different examples incl. The Emmys.
One of the primary drivers here is that too many people are 'wealthy'. This makes it hard for the people who view themselves as special to feel suitably distanced from those who they view as not special. Money used to be enough to do this, now it's all about establishing new rituals only shared by the 'in' group.
Forcing masks on the underclass makes it clear who is special, and who is not.
Well, the problem is the 2% of that 31% on the top tier which also stays there for 70years or more. Those are the ones that are really problematic.
Is the one year thing due to inheritance?
no. that would not show up in this data.
So this is suggesting that basically all middle income earners will at least have one year or more at or above 100k salary. Seem really unlikely without some extraneous outside income unless I’m missing something…
Please note that this is across all the living population, and normalized to 2020s 100k.
If you consider that people that were blue collar workers had it pretty good before the Jack Welch's 80s, this looks a lot more plausible.
The US indeed used to have a pretty robust middle class.
Inherited wealth is a one big elephant in the USA’s living room. Tax those f’ers.
Not only in the USA. its pretty much anti-meritocratic to rely more income taxes (which is a product of YOUR production capacity) than inheritance/donation taxes.
I suspect we have a LOT more two-income families today than we did back in 1970 too.
Where do the retirees fit on these curves?
we also have A LOT more low income immigrants and that has had a bit effect on selling the low end.
and still it's dropped significantly.
and we have a lot more retirees. they also see income drop sharply.
if anything this data is understating how well native born americans have done.
(i suspect it's understating it massively)
Have you considered the impact of possible manipulation of the inflation numbers? I dont have the grasp of numbers you have, but to my mind ShadowStats makes a pretty convincing case that the US systematically undercounts inflation, so there is apparently a growing disparity between the wealth that stats say exists, vs the more accurate perception of the common people on the street.
(I do not live in the US, so I have no first hand experience, but i have read about this in several places, correct me if wrong)
Yes the redefinition of inflation has been one of the key aspects to the whole thing. When you look at monetary inflation, we double the money supply about every 11 years.
To put this another way, for every $1 in circulation on 9/11 there are now $4 in circulation.
We've seen recently that government has no problem 'juking the stats'. It's just like them to inflate away their promises to those on fixed income but technically keeping them via devalued dollars.
You are correct. Thanks for your comment.