The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks(awealthofcommonsense.com) |
The top 10% owns 87% of the stocks(awealthofcommonsense.com) |
Hate capitalism or not - it allowed more people to access / to possess something than communism or feudalism
On a personal level, sure, that's responsible (for whoever can actually afford to do that), but if everyone is living frugally and don't spend that much money at all, doesn't that have pretty horrible effects on the numerous businesses that actually need consumers?
Most poor people are just earning enough to live day by day. Getting financial literacy would help little.
Oh right.
Which is to say that neo-liberal patches like “you’re poor because you’re financially illiterate!” need to go, a real structural reform must be put in place in most of the Western world.
By investing. Even with inflation adjustment historical market return is 6%.
Do they teach in school how to invest when you can barely afford food and have no disposable income? Must be easy to talk shit when sitting on your cushy white collar job.
Stop simping for billionaires, it’s pathetic.
Also, in response to these…
> “Guhuh just fununcially aducate urself”
> Must be easy to talk shit when sitting on your cushy white collar job.
> Stop simping for billionaires, it’s pathetic.
…I suggest reading the site guidelines:
So middle 60% must slave away their whole life and save for retirement while 10% live their life to the fullest? $1000 isn’t even a spec on billionaire’s radar while for someone it represents a whole year of work to spend a day of rest from this dystopia.
Which makes sense, otherwise any childless person in the West with a decent job could save 1k a month and retire with 10M, or a Google SWE5 living with a SWE4 lifestyle could save 10k a month and retire with 100M.
The issue is when something goes wrong, and you have to choose between the gas bill and mom's meds. And then you need to choose between saving that $10/mo for retirement, or for emergencies; or taking what's been saved out of the retirement fund (if that's even possible) because, well, an emergency.
Had a colleague have to sell some (most?) of their BTC at $100 to make some student loan payments. As an example.
The notion that poverty is a character flaw and that poor people just need to be better with their money, is just propaganda so that it's more palable to cut welfare programs.
To see how ridiculous it is, you just have to think about the other ned of the spectrum, the most financially irresponsible people one can observe are typically some rich kids, does it have any influence on their financial/economic future?
Education can only help so much when you are poor.
The US economy depends on those tech companies: try succeeding in a country that only has old school businesses: I remember the top stocks for France are terrifyingly old. I'm in New Zealand and we hardly have any tech stocks. Xero, RocketLabs? We often sell our successes overseas.
Edit: many of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_Americans_b... are founders. Looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_billionaires_by... and too many of the businesses are over a century old, more than a few from the 1800s.
Edit: The irony of rich Americans talking about wealth inequality is harsh. There's billions of people that desperately want the resources that a poor US citizen spends. If you are American and want to talk about the wealthy, look at yourself and ask how your wealth should be taken from you and given to the poor of the world...
France : top 10% own 60%, Bottom 50% own 5%
USA : top 10% own 72%, Bottom 50% own 2%
Sweden : top 10% own 60%, Bottom 50% own 5%
- Annual Global GDP: $105 trillion
- Cost to Feed Everyone for a Year: $10 trillion
The issue is not a lack of money but rather distribution, logistics, and political will.
Vote left and increase taxes for the rich?
it's also pointless to mention this out when, if you examine returns to public versus private markets from e.g. IPOs in the past twenty years, they are so radically lower than the twenty before. that trend is by no means abating. let's not get offended that more average joes aren't playing exit liquidity to some VC/PE guy. this is somewhat to be expected given the level of hell the government has made it to be publicly listed, the response of growing private markets, and the SEC's asinine refusal to allow anyone but rich people access to those privates.
My father is compulsive about accumulating wealth via stocks, property, etc.
My father in law could not care less about wealth accumulation, and would rather have lunch with friends outside of work.
I dont know who is happiest, but from the outside they both appear very content and satisfied.
Asking why is it wrong is similar to asking why it was wrong that most people couldn't read or write, for many of them were quite happy being illiterate.
Another is the fact that many choose to own luxury items or buy drugs (tobacco, alcohol are included) instead of... you know... saving. And then self-proclaim to live "paycheck to paycheck"⋆.
Middle class gets poorer and the rich get richer because inflation is literally eating away the former's life savings while the other has doubled his net worth in just 10 years.
⋆I am not discrediting those that are truly living paycheck to paycheck. But a lot of people blaming the system and getting poorer are usually spending a shitton of money on useless things. Financially literate people prefer to save and invest this money because they understand the cost of opportunity.
Let's say hypothetically that the distribution of stock ownership was more even across the population, and variance was largely (but not completely) due to length of time in the workforce. And further, that the stock owned by workers is a large enough block that they effectively have controlling shares at many companies. Maybe I'm talking about a different universe, but please imagine it for a moment.
Would that hypothetical world be kind of like communism in the sense that the workers own the means of production? If not, why not?
To see how bad wealth inequality in the US is, look at this graph [0] from 2023 and see if you feel any different.
0 - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-amer...
Right now, the Oligarchs (yes, we have them) are in the process of dismantling the public sector. During this process they have access to all the know-how and data. (That is a form of public-IP theft in broad daylight, btw.)
Then, when quite predictably the shit hits the fan -- as we all know many of these components of the public estate are critical services -- these same oligarchs will create private companies and "our government" will contract out these very same services to the private sector.
And yes, having thrown both baby and the bathwater into the jobless market, they also are building up the uber rolodex of competent ex-civil servants. Many, naturally, will end up working for the very same oligarchs that fired them.
It is an error in my opinion to utilize a partisan lens when considering what is happening to our nation. Trump, Elon, Thiel, and their youth shock troops are floatsome that are riding a wave that is cresting now, but the wave was set in motion during 90s when barriers erected to prevent concentration of Media and Finance in few hands were taken down by the governer from Cocaine Central. The red-blue circus is just that in my opinion.
Perhaps to save it Just give a few trillion to the people in msci world stock locked for ten years or so to teach them.
Not elsewhere.
It's only going to get worse.
The biggest reason it can't be stopped is because 1/2 of the bottom 90% of the population is screaming to get rid of social security, because... it's socialism!
Never mind that they have $0 saved for retirement. When you combine a sociopathic wealth class, and a multi-decade education deprived working class, it's a win-win for ever increasing wealth inequality.
For many in the top 10%, this is considered a good thing...
That concep/idea is called: Universal Basic Dividend.
Let's talk about non-hypothetical real world, like Nordic model or Europe in general. Capitalism produces growth, redistribution (free healthcare, education, etc. spreads the wealth).
You can found one today if you want, don't need communism for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voucher_privatization
The thing is, it began like you described - but most people didnt see the value in it and sold it immediately; thats the reason why you have some oligarch caste, as this mainly got fueled by this process (sure, not the only source of their wealth but the understood back then how to play the game)
why don't work?
first, when equity dispersion is accompanied by the dispersion of decision-making power, it can lead to excessively high decision-making costs, reduced efficiency, and lack of competitiveness. However, when equity is dispersed but decision-making power is concentrated (i.e., a dual-class share structure), the interested parties with decision-making power tend to skew the benefits towards themselves.
it's not compatitalbe with the market-oriented economic system.
second, "Altruistic collectivization" is entropy-increasing.
For example, if a company does what you said, when a crisis occurs, it's hard for it to survive. Its products may fail to be sold, and the company may go bankrupt. Other companies can also go bankrupt, but their failure is part of the capitalist system. When they fail, the system as a whole doesn't necessarily fail. But when a "communist-style" company fails, it dies, and it won't come back easily.
More importantly, this is a world dominated by capitalism. It's not just an ideology of companies, it's an ideology of states. For example, when the IMF/WHO comes to a country that is suffering from a global capitalist economic crisis, the IMF will kindly offer its help, but with some conditions, such as requiring you to also accept its help in reforming your economic system.
Although there are still some similar commercial entities that are "owned" collectively, most of them are stagnant. They can survive, but they cannot expand.
And then use the income from that to distribute wealth through things like single payer health care, affordable housing etc. So the basic needed expenses don't take up such a large portion of the budget for middle income households.
Also: stronger unions.
Who do you think makes the decision regarding the way the government will collect its money? Ans: The people with 100 million dollars or more. They pay to elect their Senator and Congressional Rep who will create the laws they are instructed to create.
So, when the wealthy told the politicians who should pay the money to operate the government, what did they decide? Ans: People who worked for a living. People who had incomes. A tax on "income".
The very thing the truly wealthy did not have unless they choose to have an income.
And, the usual way wealthy have to pay tax is when they sell an asset, such as stock. Now there are two things to know about that:
1. Why would an ultra wealthy person sell stock? Ans: To take advantage of an opportunity for that money to make an even greater annual return than it is currently making.
2. That is still not taxed as income. It is taxed as a long term capital gain. With a maximmum tax rate of 20%.
So, their money is moved from one asset to an even better asset, and they are only taxed at a flat tax of 20% on the profit when the asset is sold before it is invested into the better investment. And of course, they only do this if the proposed new investment is so much better than the way the money is currently invested, that it is going to make overwhelming financial profit after the 20% tax is paid (in other words, this is all by choice - unlike the income tax paid by the workers).
Better unions will never work in the US these days because of deindustrialization and globalization, can't really have leverage when your sector is getting smaller. There's also just no more 'union culture'.
IMHO we would have to probably have small tax on revenue rather than profit - so only something similar to VAT but smaller and without deduction. VAT seems the most honest tax since you pay it only for what you buy. Also maybe property tax but with cumulative different tax brackets (0 tax for first property). 50% average yearly rental tax for each property that is being empty more than 3 months a year - just to discourage and deflate real estate bubble.
Eventually we probably need overproduction for goods at the bottom of maslov piramid: shelter, energy, food, water, transportation. Robotics revolution maybe is some hope.
There should be a global minimum tax, but trying to make every single ruling party in the world agree to that is a fool's errand. I think that what the little that got leaked by the Panama's papers few years ago is just the tip of the iceberg.
Criteo, Datadog, Snowflake and the likes are European-based ventures but listed on the NASDAQ.
Lobbying should be illegal. All political donations should be capped at a reasonable level and should only be able to be done personally.
I'm not persuaded that this is true. They discourage investment in the stock market, and inhibit a venture capital model, but I think they encourage internal investment. I don't think it's a coincident that places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC thrived during the high marginal tax regime, nor that back then companies were more apt to train and retain skilled labor: when C-class and stock-holders are taxed at a high rate there are more-useful things to do with profits than eye-watering compensation packages and stock buybacks.
For the US specifically I disagree. The massive size of the US consumer market puts so much power in the hands of the government, that they are currently not using. Probably due to lobbying from corporations that try to prevent just that.
Agree on overproduction. This could also be handled by government subsidies or straight up government investment. Eg. solar and wind investment doesn't have a good ROI anymore for private companies. Maybe the state should be the provider of energy, so we can get very cheap and sustainable power.
We can do the same with billionaires and their assets.
The tax evasion industry (for corporations as well as for individuals) needs way more regulation and penalties. These firms inflict a net negative cost on society.
I can keep pulling examples out of the rabbit hat, just let me know.
None do. Even private schools don't. It's not part of the curriculum and children don't care about those topics. When you reach your 20s you realize how important it would've been but how boring you thought it was at the time. But since you graduated, "learning is over" so you won't teach yourself financial literacy.
> children of global elites receive the best guidance for it
Yeah... from their parents. I worked in the industry and I know that children from UHNW individuals do not want to talk and be taught about money. They are not financially literate, but they have money that allows them to delegate to someone else. This is true for anything in life, by the way: you either learn to do it or you pay someone else to do the job.
It is historically risky to bet against the US stock market.
Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions.
> I mean, you need to double your money to recover from a 50% downfall
Nonsensical argument if you already doubled your money by being in the market for a long time - which appears to be especially true for tech stocks. Buffett talks about "time in the market".
Timing the market is often regarded as gambling: maybe because the idea is so alluring.
Disclaimer: I like trying to time the market, even though I believe the experts that say I shouldn't. Sold all crypto related investments about a month ago (not just timing, also opinion from looking at how crypto is used while I was travelling in Argentina, and other reasons). I believe any investment should have multiple good reasons, and can maybe have one or two poor reasons too!!!
>Spelling his name wrong will generally bias people against your financial opinions.
Yeah let me worry about that as I type it on a phone with an unruly keyboard lol.
>Perhaps listen to Buffett and Charlie saying they didn't time markets
Where did I say you should time it? I just said, don't invest in things that are obviously overvalued. Buffett is having trouble finding anything that isn't overvalued, so his cash stockpile is growing. You can view that as timing the market or whatever, but the bottom line is that buying overvalued stuff is a guaranteed loser. And when prices come down, you need to have money available to buy anything that is at a reasonable price. Of course inflation makes it difficult to figure if prices are actually good or not, and makes it harder to preserve value while waiting for a good buy. But it's a lot safer to try to do that in general.
As more of the population feels the effects of inequality they won't appeased by just fancy toys and shiny things, they will want change by force. My only solace is I'll probably be long dead by the time that happens.
His wealth was mainly in very illiquid land. A lot of it was near worthless unless US won the war since it was beyond the line drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and white settlers were generally banned from settling there.
Otherwise like many landholders back in the day he was semi-broke and had limited access to cash.
Of course after the war of course he was both compensated for his expenses and got “his” land in Ohio (more or less)
Is that true ?
As far as I am aware, the money the French Government alone loaned to the US during the revolutionary war (at least two million dollars[0]) far exceeded the value of Washington personal wealth (estimated at $780,000 in 1799 [1], so at the time of his death, not during the war).
And this is not counting all the loans made from other foreign sources (the Spanish Government and private Dutch investors), and the money raised directly by the Continental Congress.
Also, as others have said, it would have been almost impossible to liquidate his assets (his lands and his slaves) during the war - the problem was availability of cash, not wealth.
[0] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/loans [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finances_of_George_Washington#...
Smaller groups you can outright kill in daylight, but better to get to them first to torture and kill them out of sight.
Once you need to kill 500.000 who are protesting and if violence to quell the hoards wakes up more people who want to see the regime fail.
Literally all the founding fathers stood to be wealthier by getting the colonies to work with Britain than against it. Like, this is basic fucking math. Dragging armies across the economy you do business in with the end result being you are on your own and can no longer rely on the dominant economic power for protection and trade agreements and whatnot is not how you get fabulously rich if you are already starting from "not peasant".
If you want to look at them through an economic lens the right one to choose is "the founding fathers were rich enough that they knew that even if revolution was bad on a macro level they'd still be filthy rich and wouldn't starve"
>But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
I think you need to look at more revolutions. What tends to happen is a shuffling of the people who are already on top and the "HN class" of high end professionals, academics, media personalities, business leaders and other "peasants who are critical to the system" wind up in the gulags or losing their heads because the "fungible peasants" are pissed off at them for really squeezing out every penny until the system collapsed.
That was a rebellion, not a revolution. The colonial elite broke away from the mother country. They sculpted the eventual legal and political structure to protect their power and privilege without having to pay taxes.
If you're looking for a revolution, better look at the French Revolution or the October Revolution.
At least Bukele seems to get this. As does the IMF, as evidenced by their panicked attempt to shut him down.
No rush in any case though; the people who understand Bitcoin the best are those that need to, and rapid adoption is just a stressor on those building out the rails.
That’s a rather skewed take. You might see what Washington himself said about becoming that leader.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-pr...
George Washington wasn’t a signer of the Declaration of Independence either, so this idea that he concocted the revolution for personal gain is silly. He was appointed to lead the Continental Army by John Adams because of Washington’s military experience and his being from Virginia which was an asset in unifying the colonies.
I agree. Too often 'revolutions' are framed as though common people were responsible for it - because it appeals to the modern day 'peasants' ( the 'middle' class and below) ideas of a 'fair' society. They are just pawns in a larger game and they are oblivious to it.
They could vote for lefties like Corbyn or Bernie but they don't because things aren't that bad.
> 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War
Could you provide some support for this claim?
I believe it will help me deal with the current doomsday news (and be more stoic in general).
A lot of revolutions were carried out by people with very little resources - Mao led his army from under-developed hills, the October Revolution didn't have much of an industrial base either, nor did the left in the Spanish civil war (although the military eventually won, but hey, they had a fighting chance).
And aside from that, many revolutions happen relatively peacefully. For example Chile or South Africa. Although the latter case did have some violence and property destruction.
And aside from that, guns in the USA (assuming we're talking about this and not Europe) are cheap and plentiful. And a large, determined, but poorly-armed opposition has often beaten the smaller, well-armed forces of decadent states in the past.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that though - even a peaceful movement can succeed if it's widespread.
The feds are bleeding us dry to line they and their corrupt friends pockets and their public debt.
This suggests that taxing the slaves would have better helped the poor. Was it helping them before the war? Were the poor suddenly worse off because of the revolution?
> it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
Do George Washington's heirs control a significant portion of today's wealth?
Won't happen in a society where elders are more numerous than young. In the past it required a lot of young males thinking they have not much to lose, but they are becoming extinct.
Old people won't revolt, middle-aged fathers that need to think of their children and mortgage won't revolt.
If you are a landless peasant you know if you are being too heavily taxes - you can see how much the land produces. People have no idea whether they are overpaying for food at the end of a long supply chain, let alone for technology.
Another factor is when you are paying for many things, its only worth worrying about the most expensive as the others are relatively trivial. Compared to housing and utilities the rest is hardly worth thinking about.
That said, the subscriptions do keep growing. But, in fairness, most cloud services have ongoing cost to the business, so ongoing consumer costs make sense.
It's not so much "inequality is evil" (tho he surely think so), but rather "inequality breeds catastrophic revolutions".
Source? I have some doubts about this claim. Are you sure this doesn't simply measure one form of labor while ignoring another?
Inequality doesn’t matter really nowadays. There will be no revolution as most of people are out of poverty despite what narration on the internet is.
Living conditions as today day poor person are immensely better than 18 or 19th century peasants.
Whoever has billions does not affect me having running water in faucets and me enjoying life.
Warm water is not all there is to life but it is a lot.
Whether or not people are in subsistence poverty is not the only measure of a functioning society. It's great that extreme poverty is going down, but let's not declare Mission Accomplished just yet. The existence of billionaires might not affect your running water, but it does distort the market and negatively affect how much everything around you costs, from housing to healthcare to groceries. The existence of billionaires also affects your share of power in democracy. A billionaire is right now, running amok, griefing workers and tearing down institutions. All because his billions bought him the power to do that.
You might change your "billionaires existing doesn't bother me" Enlightened Apathy if they one day kill a government service you rely on or decide your job must end because they need double digit stock growth again this year.
People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem.
At worst we will get an angry mob stampeding the White House with no real direction or objective. Are rich people the problem or is it the government? They may have a feeling "something" is wrong, but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, or they may think that nothing is wrong and life is just hard.
Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.
Its just amazing as an outsider to see the other side calling Trump voters they don't understand what they voted for.
"Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it.
"Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause? Let's consider how that happens:
When you buy something for $100, part of that money goes to labor (the employees who made or distributed it etc.) and part goes to capital (the investors who own the company). Employees generally spend all of their income, so that's not an issue. As it turns out, so do most investors, by population count, because most businesses are small businesses. The owner of the local salon might be getting a dividend from the place but she's using that to buy groceries.
Then there's Larry Ellison. Screw that guy, am I right? Somehow that asshole has more money than it would take to buy the entirety of Boeing with enough left over to buy General Motors and Halliburton put together. And he's not spending it fast enough to make the number go down instead of up.
But wait, how did that happen? He definitely didn't end up with $200B by investing $100 in the Dow and letting it compound for 50 years.
His company did, however, get billions of dollars in government contracts and in general makes its money by selling copyright licenses to its 50 year old database software. In fact, if you look at the list of companies minting all of these billionaires, they're almost all tech companies, relying on a government-granted copyright monopoly that originally expired after 14 years.
And if you look at the ones that aren't tech, they're drug companies (another government-granted monopoly and an industry that has thoroughly captured the regulators) and finance companies (possibly the only industry with more regulatory capture than medicine).
From this we can notice a trend. You get billionaires when the laws impair competition in their industry and the industry consolidates into megacorps. So that's the cause. That's what you need to prevent.
What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained?
Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.
It seems like a symptom. Primarily because "wealth management" does seem to be a skill. So the expectation would be that even if you equalized all wealth tomorrow and suddenly educated everyone to the same level in it's management then in a very short time a large imbalance would again be created.
> but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame,
It's impossible to acknowledge that both of you are most likely equally wrong but just in different directions? If you worked together you'd get much further yet you can't even grant them basic personal agency. What a bummer. Inequality abounds.
People's wealth were more geographically locked and tied to land back then.
And nuclear. We have yet to see our first nuclear civil war.
_very_ slightly edited from its original.
Right now it looks like wealth is self-enforcing. Across certain thresholds, you can get an expert or have the network to help with your taxes, legal issues, investment strategy and so on. Maybe you even inherited it all from your parents. There are certainly prominent counter examples of people who crossed these thresholds with their own hard work. The majority of people does not.
For a more snappier version, see this video by a former professor of history, university of Wisconsin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
Think about young people trying to buy their 1st home now, its becoming impossible.
Is there any discussion/research/case study analysis where this is explored? I.e. overall citizen satisfaction/economic productivity and how it relates to wealth distribution?
Every scaled up platforms then gets trapped into collecting/selling personal data and flooding the field with Ads (and obviously in these ad auctions the 10% can outbid the majority so Ad prices keep rising).
Comparatively, you need to earn $663,164 to be in the top 1%, and more than $3M to be in the top 0.1%.
I just want to highlight this to remind that the top 10% is by far not made up exclusively of ultra-rich individuals like people on internet like to believe.
The big takeaway for me was that wealth inequality never improves without some major catastrophe (war, revolution, plague etc). The proposed model is really intuitive and compelling (tldr; return on capital has historically always been higher than real growth, which guarantees indefinite concentration of wealth until there's a crisis).
Last year's Nobel Economics Prize winners, Acemoglu and Robinson, tell a similar story in "Why Nations Fail", which I am working through at the moment. Although in their case, they seem be suggesting a more causal link between erosion of political and economic institutions and the collapse of empires.
I wish these ideas were more broadly accessible and understood. The real risk of total societal collapse should transcend any partisan fighting about ideal tax rates, government inflation/unemployment targets etc. Everyone has a common interest in there not being a violent upheaval (arguably the rich most of all).
Last I checked the numbers, current wealth inequality seems about as bad as it was before the great depression. And its not enough to just say "well, absolute wealth is more important". As others have pointed out, its not stable to have such huge relative wealth disparities. And that's before you even consider corruption.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203961/wealth-distributi...
Wealth equality is not really a goal, it better to ask if the bottom 50% got wealthier in absolute terms, which the author answers in another post:
I know a lot of working class people with significant savings (more than I have) but they tend to just put it in a savings account at a bank or perhaps invest in a property to let out.
Many people see the stock market as a casino even though you have far less risk in index funds than you do by renting out property.
As for the slight drift in US wealth distribution since 1980, it’s wholly explained by the change in age demographics. Since 1980 we’ve gone from a nation of people 30 years old to 40 years old. 10 years is a lot of time when it comes to compounding returns on productive assets (stocks, etc). Due to compounding, wealth held by each age group also gets more Pareto-extreme heading into retirement age.
Adjust that out, and this is mostly a nothing burger. But emotionally people don’t feel that way so nothing I say will change that. Narrative zeitgeist always wins over objective reality.
Average Americans are wealthier than they've ever been. Another chart to drive this home, the percentage of Americans who have a passport since 1989 (Note, this is also influenced by age demographics, but not as dramatically as wealth): https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning...
Looking at averages is completely irrelevant when talking about inequality.
Here's a video from 12 years ago: Wealth Inequality in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
My point is that pareto distributions ("inequality") are not some evil to be eliminated, they're the direct memetic outcome of how humans work.
We can of course cut all the tall poppies to make everyone equal, but that's just cutting off your nose to spite one's face.
Allowing inequality to exist is why average Americans are the wealthiest people on the planet. Turns out all those tall poppies drive the productivity gains that accrue to all of us (hence why we've gone from near-zero Americans holding passports to 50% of people during the same time frame that inequality has increased).
I know, it doesn't fit with the narrative you have in your head so I won't convince you otherwise.
So, to not inconvenience these 3 individuals, you wont make a significant impact to the bottom 50% of US citizens.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...
And it has (in inflation-adjusted terms, lower income Americans have become richer over many decades).
As long as you have anything less than full reserve banking (and even there, the interest could be an issue if left unchecked -- perhaps why Islam and Christianity both ban its practice), this corruption of sound money will skew the playing field.
According to this source, 40 percent of US stock is owned by foreigners: https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-owns-us-stock-foreign...
Individual
- top quintile - $120k
- top 10% - $165k
Household
- top quintile - $167K
- top 10% - 235K
> "Wealth inequality is only getting worse in this country and frankly I’m not sure what stops this train."
Best trick is allowing the top 50% to hate the bottom 50% and naturally visa versa BUT ALSO have a huge portion of the bottom 50% to root and vote for the top.
It feels like this has been true just past stock market's inception.
> These numbers have all increased since 1989 as well — total wealth (60.8% to 67.3%), stocks (81.7% to 87.2%), private businesses (78.4% to 84.4%) and real estate (38.2% to 43.9%).
So no. It has not always been like this.
Pareto wealth distribution also gets more extreme heading into retirement ages due to the nature of compounding on productive assets.
And in the case of the US, you have people who willingly vote against their interest by demonizing other groups.
I disagree, people were even more brainwashed in the past since their only source of information was what the church and the king would tell them (Plato's cave allegory) while now you have a plethora of independent unbiased sources of information plus leaks and whistleblowers out in the open to thanks to the internet and social media.
Sure, you have a lot of fake news and propaganda today form the mainstream and social media, but back then it was all exclusively fake news and propaganda, as only the ruling elites had the truth and they'd never share that with the peasants, while any peasantry who dared speaking the truth that went against the official narrative would be punished for heresy. That's why Europe spent so much time in the dark ages and the advent of freedom of thought also brought in the Renaissance era.
>When the brain is chained, there is no hope for a revolution.
I disagree, people in the west today have a lot more freedom of information and freedom of speech than in the distant past. Well, unless you live in the UK or Germany where the police arrests you for posting a meme online about a politician, try to ban encrypted chat and sources of information they consider "hateful" in order to control the narrative and restrict the population to only vote for the entrenched establishment.
at no time has there been a good outcome from which this change made.
The people who applied the force merely swapped with those who had wealth. Essentially, they wanted the wealth, and co-opted the masses to enable themselves.
What we have today is relatively good. Just because you see some billionaire who have more yachts than you could ever hope to own, doesn't mean you aren't living a good life. At least the french revolution was in part about lack of food and starvation. I dont see america starving.
unless you're in the bottom 50%
> I dont see america starving.
True, but starvation is a pretty low bar; obesity and all the related health problems due to an unhealthy diet (because garbage is the cheapest food and what the bottom 50% can afford in the US) is the modern version of starvation
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hunger-us-continued-multi-y...
> Hunger reached its highest point in the United States in nearly a decade last year, with 18 million households, or 13.5%, struggling at some point to secure enough food, a Department of Agriculture report released on Wednesday said.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america
I mean, sure, they are not "staring", it's only hunger...
The pendulum metaphor fails often; here are some examples where it cannot make sensible predictions: species level extinction; major technological shifts; the overall growth of economies (upward), the growth of attitudes around human rights.
Why does the pendulum metaphor fail? It has no explanatory ability to handle non-cyclic things. Mathematically, it has too few degrees of freedom and a poor functional form.
How often does the pendulum argument make a testable prediction? Is there a prediction of _when_ something will happen? Is there a scientific study (or even statistical analysis) of the underlying factors?
The pendulum argument often serves as some kind of wishful thinking; just wait, it says, and things will (somehow) “swing back” to the middle. For a while, at least, until there is some kind of overreaction.
Enough. Let’s call bullsh-t on this vague metaphor. There are better ways of thinking.
(In contrast, the statistical concept of “reversion to the mean” is a mathematical fact. Using it when observing real world data helps us assess the nature of the underlying statistical distributions.)
The alternative is returning to a feudal gilded age where there are a very very small cabal of asset owning lords, a very small class of scribes for the lords, and then a sea of serfs.
The whole concept of wealth accumulation is entirely human-made, and influenced by what the society is willing to tolerate.
It only becomes a problem if people are miserable, the palace stops being a beautiful landmark and becomes a symbol of oppression.
Back to stocks, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with the top 10% owning 87% of the stocks (in the US, because apparently, the rest of the world doesn't exist...). The stock market is risky, that's really a thing for those who have all their basic needs covered and can afford to lose big. Owning stock i.e. investing in companies is also among the most best things to society the rich can do, compared to, say, building palaces for themselves.
All that to say that if some causes are worth revolting against, I just don't think inequality in stock ownership is one of them.
Absolutely enormous amounts of money.
I’m still “waiting” for the GFC to correct the Australian housing market…
QE was not, but, you know, everyone who owns assets or had a job turned out to be a beneficiary of it.
At least in Finland today it's much easier for young people to buy their 1st home now compared to 15 years ago. Interest rates are roughly where they were 15 years ago, but house prices in real terms have gone way down. There's also huge market asymmetry with large amount of vacant properties that nobody wants to buy, and relatively few buyers.
So why is it different in Finland? Is there a lot of free space around then cities? Or doesn't everyone want to live in Helsinki?
A market crash like that would result in extremely broad layoffs, major global supply chain instabilities, and a cataclysmic knock on effect of capital losses into nearly every walk of life on earth.
Not to mention, as many already have, the federal govt would undoubtedly bail out the worst actors and leave the poor to fend for themselves.
Just yesterday the Treasury Department announced they aren’t going to enforce a money laundering law. You think they’re going to New Deal a major crash’s now? No way.
The top 10% aren’t losing their jobs in a crash, but the bottom 50% might.
So while the top 10% keeps investing and will maximize the recovery, the bottom 50% will cash out at the bottom and won’t return to invest for years after their emergency fund has recovered.
I've never felt that I am entitled to any sort of property even when being software engineer to the core, even more a house, as a young person right after university. That was always a hard-won luxury, and I don't even mean some extremely well located place.
Some folks here often mention similar stuff and refer to some period in 50s/60s in US specifically where 1 salary could have done it in some more rural areas. Nobody mentions how rest of the population looked like, hardly whole US population was buying new houses with wife being stay-at-home mum.
When women started going to work too, suddenly such couples quickly outcompeted single earners from housing market. In Europe, this stay-at-home was never the thing in most places so we never even had such period, thus 0 such expectations. Properties, especially houses, were always a hard-won luxury.
Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly.
They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.
Not to mention none of them had to go to the Nuremberg trials...
It's their system, it's their game.
> They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today.
Yes, these families exist. But there is an equal amount of them that went to the poorhouse that you don't know about. Many German Nazis that got wealthy through stealing/grafting of Jewish businesses _did_ lose their assets. Others still stayed somewhat wealthy but are now just barely millionaires.
It's very easy to get fooled by survivorship bias, since it's only the companies and people that are still wealthy that get heavily covered. I don't think a publisher would accept a book like Nazi Billionaires about all the people that are no longer relevant at all.
edit: I have to say, I also think it's terrible that so many people could just go on like nothing happened. Doubly so for the bureaucracy, diplomats and judges -- both in Germany and the Axis collaborators.
But this is how the world goes. The only people punished for the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward or the Gulags were those caught up in internal purges. The new Syrian government threw a few of the worst people in Jail, but cannot dismiss everyone involved in the old system for practical reasons. The Architects and executors of British and Dutch "counter-insurgency" strategies to keep their colonies have Barracks named after them. I could go on with American examples but I think we all know.
Or eventually get the parents house from generation to generation.
What's happened is a massive shift from a small-scale agricultural economy to a mix of urban and large-scale agriculture, and the building of homes/apartments hasn't kept pace.
in the great depression, the crash did reduce inequality
in the covid19, the crash increased inequality
my opinion is that nowadays, fortune is highly financialized.
during a crisis, for most(99.99%) ordinary people who are in the market, they suffer the real lose, and they have nothing to comeback, even have to sell their assets to pay their bills, all they can get from the goverment is something like food banks, or the best situation, get a job to sell their labor
but for certain people either hold enough cash or can obtain enough cash from government relief programs, putting them in a position of advantage, this enables them to quickly reap a large amount of wealth during an economic crisis.
If you're not rich but invested whatever you could over the course of your life and now the market tanks to where you've lost half (or more) of what you had then someone else is going to win that from you.
A massively rich company can hold out a lot longer than a software developer who tucked away what they could over the years. If a real crash happens that software developer just got 30 years of their net worth mostly vaporized in a few months.
How much of the population is in that category? It's the whole middle class basically. It's a crushing blow to most folks when the market crashes for a long period of time. It's even worse for folks who are already in a position of barely scraping by while putting a little bit aside whenever they can. That person is destroyed if a majority of that disappears because they may have to sell it off on the spot just to survive because if the market really crashes, you can be sure a ton of people are going to be out of work.
A billionaire with $200B in wealth could lose 99% of that and still have $2B, generational wealth that will perpetually fund an entire family tree down to great great grandchildren.
I personally think that the Fed papers are just designed as an excuse to print money, but my point is the Fed is very far from seeing this as a problem and will never act to remedy it.
It would probably make it harder if it were anything like 2008.
The issue with housing is that throughout the Western world we've made it incredibly difficult to get new housing built.
Imagine if everyones socks were suddenly valued a million bucks, except yours. Would you "stay in the same place" or would you suddenly be too poor to afford to buy the labor of all the newly minted millionaires? I'd bet on the latter.
It also causes a lot of companies to go out of business or reduce their workforce because of reduced consumer spending, hurting the working class more.
They are only scared of one thing.
This would assume rich people have all their money in stocks, which is not correct.
Lina Khan types need solid support and fire power to make a dent.
Congress will not let the stock market crash because they are #1 insider traders.
Here's a recipe for happiness: stop comparing yourself to others and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. It's old advice, but it's clearly been forgotten.
cheap products from 3rd world
cheap nature resources from 3rd world
cheap labor from 3rd world
that's why many of the free citizens of the Empire don't need to care about inequality at all
when these things change, you will care
Have you.. lived in other countries? I came here from southeast Asia and yes, my BigTech salary affords me a comfortable life, but I simply don't understand why the bottom 90% aren't up in arms over here.
Instead we should be looking at the cups below us who can barely get by their salary
Well the idea is that (correctly or incorrectly) lower inequality would result in significantly higher absolute living standards.
Arguably they had been going up at the pace they have over the last several decades almost entirely due to technological progress (and more arguably globalization/free trade).
Average productivity has been in increasing at a much faster rate than median or below median absolute living standards. Growing inequality is possibly the main culprit.
> looking in the other guy's cup
Well hard not to do that when the other guy has turned off the tap after filling his cup..
It could be way worse but it could also be better. There are people in the U.S without good health care or access to dignified jobs (or at least - a livable salary). These are issues that can be improved by a lot, it's not a law of nature.
That amounts to cultural and political hegemony. Telling people to accept that is a little like telling them to know their place.
Historically, one of the major turning points in the cycles of society/governments is when there is massive inequitable distribution of wealth such that the masses are left to divvy up a tiny piece of the pie while the top .05% hoard 80+% of the wealth. IMO we are currently seeing the wealthiest people on earth taking over the levers of the US government and it is unlikely we will ever return to the constitutional democracy we used to have. Moving forward Elon Musk and the other members of his Gothic MAGA will decide how much the government can spend each year and on what and for whose benefit.
A very, very different scenario than being envious of the sports car in your neighbor's driveway.
(Although, I guess if your metric is "citizen satisfaction" maybe that's not as terrible).
In any case, there are lots of case studies showing what happens at the extreme inequality end of the spectrum. As I mentioned in another comment, my favorites come from Piketty "Capital in the 21st Century" and Acemoglu & Robinson "Why Nations Fail".
In the latter, the case study on the rise and fall of Venice is particularly fascinating - huge economic growth due to inclusive economic institutions that promoted social mobility, followed by a downturn once the aristocracy moved to entrench their own interests at society's expense. This seems to be the central thesis of the book, although I'm only a few chapters in.
The parallels with modern US politics are pretty hard to ignore though.
Not in any kind. It is absolutely the case, if there's mostly untaxed generational wealth transfer. Imagine this - you are born in this world with nothing. And every parcel of land and property is owned by somebody - somebody who with high likelihood inherited it or hundreds of millions or billions of assets on spawn.
Now obviously, you can inherit all sorts of other factors too - like very valuable social networks and a set of trade skills carefully passed down and tought. But even neglecting those, the largely untaxed generational wealth transfer would naturally lead to massive inequalities and disproportionate amounts of wealth concentrated in few families.
My point was that pointing out "Top x% own Top x+y% of good z" doesn't say anything meaningful without contextualizing why (if) this is a bad thing, and what x and y should be for a given z.
The upshot is that wealth inequality is above or close to historical high points and that it has actual and severe real world negative consequences.
When there’s massive inequality in the system, the super rich will compete with you for resources. Resources can include:
- Housing, of which fewer and fewer people could afford owning at the median income level
- Education, think buying access to spots at top schools and the ability to afford the fees/debt
- Political power, think Elon Musk in the western world
- Media/consensus, think Jeff Bezos, and think blaming of immigrants for house prices
- In the current tax system, the super rich could inherit wealth while paying very little tax, and they can borrow money at very low rates collaterized with the massive amounts of assets their own: meanwhile some of us pay a 30-50% tax on our income and are struggling to save for a downpayment or retirement.
With the massive financial power of the super rich, it’s not so much that this is bad in an “evil” way. Rather, it’s bad for the rest of us because the super rich are indifferent to us in pursuit of their own agendas in the “cosmic indifference” kind of way. Just as how we humans destroy anthills with an indifference if they get in the way of road constructions, the super rich would “run over” us if it benefits them.
Just looking "more uniform" would be a great starting point. The optimal distribution is left as an open question for future research.
Not having the perfect solution upfront should not block incremental improvements, which is more or less what is happening ATM. E.g. people argue we cannot have free healthcare because the proverbial "welfare queen" will also receive it.
What makes you think the optimal distribution is "more uniform" rather than less? I'm not taking sides in this question, simply pointing out that the headline is rather meaningless without context
At the same time, one could imagine a situation where wealth is so abundant that even the lowest 1% could afford any modern luxury. In that case it probably wouldn't be so bad if the top few wealthiest individuals had enough money to buy and own whole planets. They would likely use their wealth to make life worse for others, as they tend to, but that's out of the scope of this model.
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...
It paints a pretty poor picture of what is possible. I met many uneducated immigrants on a fish processing boat in the Bering Sea making 10k a month, a job usually begging for people. They would show me pictures of their wives and children living well.
The former is less meaningful as it ignores your cost of living.
The majority of people who earn a top 1% income only manage to do so for a short period.
As a consequence the overlap between top 1% by income and by wealth is small. They are (broadly speaking) different groups.
It's VERY effective.
Anyway, if anything the distribution based on wealth would even more starkly be hyper-focused at the top, the people in the 10-9% range aren't exactly sitting on mountains of gold.
There's two ways to stay the richest man in the world:
a) Get more money.
b) Stop people from getting more money than you.
And I suppose c) Do both. If that's what you are about.
A lot of people characterize corporations as a sociopath because it expresses a lot of clinical markers. I think if you frame the economy as war, you'll find similar markers. People are exhausted, shell shocked, constantly insecure, attrition or the feeling of attrition (feeling of no progress). PTSD from this everlasting war.
The number of Americans with passports is at an all time high of 48%, and some of that is simply for convenience ID for internal flights.
And you need both time and money for a vacation. The average American family probably can't take 2-3 weeks off to travel every year, which makes their vacations shorter and cheaper.
Also, Hotels and Airbnb's are incredibly expensive (even for me, working a decent job with a good income) for families. That's why i chose campings over hotels and bought a decent tent.
Yes, the vast majority of the US population has never traveled overseas. Many of those who do, do so once in a lifetime.
If you’re not rich, but spend more than rich people do on stuff, you’re going to have a hard time getting rich.
A lot of vacations also involve crashing at another family member or friends spare bedroom/fold out couch.
I grew up with family vacations like this (inflation adjusted) and I had a great time. It’s hard to wrap your mind around when you think vacations require significant travel.
Here's how I would sum up his main argument: Ordinary people have less money and can no longer afford to buy property. Governments have less money, infrastructure everywhere is eroding. So where does all the wealth go? The only possible answer is to the very rich, who are doing better than ever, while everyone else is down financially.
To be clear, this is not about the entrepreneur who made a couple million bucks and has three houses. It's about the top 0.1 % who are sucking everyone else dry, permanently: The poor, the middle class, and the government.
We need to do something to reverse this trend. And soon.
His theory (which sounds plausible to me) is that a lot of the wealth of the ultra rich is actually bound up or linked to immovable assets. At the same time, investments in these assets is what makes them unaffordable for everyone else (i.e. your kids won't be able to buy a house anywhere in the country, despite them earning more after adjusting for consumer goods inflation).
By taxing large real estate wealth accumulation (think personal wealth in the tens or hundreds of millions and up), you get the best of both worlds: The (ultra) rich who want to stay invested have to pay your taxes (they can't move real estate to a tax haven) and thus transfer part of their wealth back to society. And if they divest from real estate, it puts downward pressure on real estate prices, thus making it more affordable for the rest of us. Win-win, from a society's perspective.
How specifically doesn’t matter as long as it’s enough. The way I see it, the best ideas, other than all out socialism, is to have progressive taxes that start low and have extremely steep curves.
Just one example, we could have a progressive property tax. For people who own a single reasonably sized home that they actually live in, the property tax would be very low and reasonable. However, if people own multiple properties, properties they don’t live in, or extremely large properties, the tax rate would increase and then skyrocket to the point where a wealthy person has no choice but to sell those properties or lose money. All that selling will bring down the price of real estate. At the same time, nobody will be in a position to buy that real estate except for those who don’t already have much, because for anyone else the tax will be too high for it to work out. If they don’t sell, they pay enormous tax, which is also acceptable. Either way we reverse the transfer of wealth.
Apply this same progressive scale to capital gains tax and estate tax. Also income tax, but less so. Effectively this puts a cap on wealth. If a person tries to own more than their fair share of things, they won’t make more money. Of course you still allow people to be quite rich. There will be multi-millionaires with fancy cars and mansions. There will still be movie stars, sports team owners, and bankers. They will still live lives of luxury and want for nothing. They just won’t control our entire society.
How do you spend it? You spend it on anything that benefits labor and makes everyone’s lives better. You don’t use it on a fossil fuel subsidy. You don’t use it on defense contracts. You use it on universal health care, social security, education, FEMA, infrastructure. Pretty much you do the exact opposite of whatever DOGE is doing.
> Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...
I didn't know Acemoglu got the Nobel Economics Prize.
If you have no net wealth, but a Scandinavian-style social safety net (not just retirement income, but healthcare, free access to arts/culture/parks and so on), you can still live a good life.
"Does the 80th percentile have an outsize claim on lifelong wellbeing relative to the 20th percentile" is a better metric than just looking at bank balances.
Also have to consider age effects, to what extent people move naturally up and down through the centiles through early and late working life and retirement. Looking at net wealth centiles in isolation doesn't tell you very much about how a society works.
And most Americans have no idea how unequal wealth distribution really is, which means that those emotions are being easily redirected onto vulnerable groups by the people actually responsible for the gross inequality: immigrants, trans people, foreign powers etc.
* See, for example, the vast gulf between public opinion on issues like Israel, public healthcare, free education and housing for all, vs the opinion of the political and media class.
Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.
No, it's not. Capitalism has nothing to do with equality. We can have extreme inequality as long as the workers actually get enough to satisfy them. That of course depends on many things like their productivity, supply and demand for labor, and preventing monopolistic abuses by corporations and labor.
>Capitalism only efficiently allocates resources if the market value of a good or service closely approximatatoon its "true" value to society. And that ceases to be the case when wealth is very unevenly spread.
Wealth inequality has nothing to do with market efficiency. Every person in the market makes decisions according to their own estimations of what the true value of a thing is. That's basically a democratized hive mind at work. If any individual spots a market inefficiency, they can try to exploit it, and in so doing increase overall satisfaction of market participants. This distinguishes capitalism from other systems like communism, which rely on a small number of central planners to make necessarily imperfect decisions for everyone based on limited understanding of the entire economy and all its participants.
It's just we often see these "outrageous" statistics without perspective.
What has it been historically?
Are we still better off than soviet Russia?
It so easily becomes: capitalism = bad.
Whether things may get better for the poor or may not isn’t so much the point as I see it. The observation here is that the poor, and their anger, become pawns for the games of elites. Sometimes those games benefit them where an elite acts as a benevolent avatar of their anger, but this is usually a transient faux-alliance because the elite calls the shots and has no genuine interest in a positive outcome for the poor they claim to represent.
The delta can increase and QOL across all incomes increase (albit different rates).
If the people here just want 100% equality, just state it as intention.
I think people should stop fetishizing billionaires one way or the other.
Or do we only do that in other countries?
I don't know what you want to label it as but being able to ride out a crash and having your unrealized losses go back to normal while still having capital to buy a ton when the market was near the bottom of a crash sounds like a lot like transferring wealth to me (from the middle to the top).
Anyway, that’s the path we are on - Piketty doesn’t hazard a guess about if/when society collapse, IIRC the point is just that things will only continue to get more unequal unless there’s a major crisis or some political intervention (e.g wealth or inheritance taxes - imagine trying to get the US to agree to that lol).
Also you can’t ignore relative inequality because wealth is strongly coupled to political power/influence.
Look at the head of DOGE - he spent $300m to get himself a top gov role, in charge of regulating his own business and restructuring US gov spending to suit his own whims.
In terms of percentages / orders of magnitude it’d be like your avg citizen spending $100 for a top gov role.
American households have a good amount of discretionary spending, but for the ticket items that actually matter such as quality housing, healthy food and healthcare my money stretches a lot further in Western Europe, for median household income that is.
And with that argument, you reduce every.single.revolution to a 'surgical strike by a minority faction'. The French Revolution becomes a surgical strike of a few enlightened bourgeois in Paris. The American Rebellion becomes the rebellion of a very small clique of rich colonial landowners. No revolution would be an exception.
Every single revolution happens through a vanguard party pushing it forward - that's what the Bolsheviks got right.
> it wasn't about what people wanted
It wasn't what the better-off bourgeois and their dependents in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions wanted. It was apparently what the people wanted, because the resulting, foreign-aided civil war was won by the power of those people. No revolution can win a civil war without popular support.
Look, I am all for hatin' the big man when he deserves it and he often does, but lets be a bit smart and not just throw random angry spits without checking the facts, shall we?
Do you even realize that during covid globally money lost some 20-30% of their purchasing power? That's real burning cash of regular folks right in front of you and everybody else.
So yeah before we say: "it always looks like this, it's just about what the parameters are", we need to measure it and have a clearer idea of what it looks like in different societies otherwise we won't be able to decide what the desirable parameters are like.
Doing so conveys sloppy thinking while pretending to be rigorous only on the surface.
Not realizing what had happened, in three years I went from "almost enough to buy a house in the city in cash" to "have to buy vacant rural wasteland then develop it myself from scratch."
The latter worked out, but cost me two years of my life of hard labor. Those two years of manual labor more or less represent what home owners took from non owners via the central bank.
Ignoring the meta economy lessons etc, how was it? Do you love what you've done?
How did you do it? Where is it? What was surprisingly hard and what was surprisingly easy? Etc etc etc, please tell all!
Love this kind of stuff :D (An HNer just embarking on a house self-building project)
Meanwhile, the insiders who knew what was going on (that the packaged mortgages were super high risk) insured their risk through new financial products - specifically 'credit default swaps' marked by AIG. The gimmick there was that AIG designed the swaps in a way that avoided insurance reserve regulations - and thus AIG had no money set aside in the event of default.
So when the shit hit the fan taxpayers coughed up close to 200 billion dollars to cover the 'swaps' sold by AIG that were backed by ... nothing.
A fair number of billionaires rose out of the ashes of those shenanigans. None were ever charged. That's how 'capitalism' works in the gold old USA. Always has. Always will.
Obviously sarcasm, but taking your argument at face value this is what rational (not necessarily moral) citizen of europe/usa should think. For that reason I don't think this is a good argument.
i'm just saying that there are reasons why people can "calmly" and "rationally" view inequality. when those reasons change, they will lose their composure.
and this is not new
> In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.”
What you are doing - in essence - is making it sound like gigantic economic inequalities and wealth concentrations in hands of few families are some underlying, unavoidable fact of universe.
While in reality they are - largely - a result of unlimited, largely untaxed generational wealth transfer. And outcomes of other similar policies.
>My point was that pointing out "Top x% own Top x+y% of good z" doesn't say anything meaningful
No, it does. It shows just how grossly wealth is increasingly captured by a small amount of people. Depending on what those x, y and z, you can gauge the actual shape of the "non-uniform distribution" and how it changes over time. Which is exactly the point.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but you're arguing my point. Without contextualizing the numbers, the headline tells us only that not everybody has the same amount of X.
> It shows just how grossly wealth is increasingly captured by a small amount of people.
The sloganeering and lack of explaining which numbers qualify as "gross" and which as acceptible and worth striving for under headlines like this is precisely what I'm criticizing. Is it still gross inequality if the top 10% own 60% of wealth? 50%? 20%?
Suddenly everyone in the world owns a vial of potentially the elixir of life, except you. Can you still buy tomatoes when your neighborhood has sold their socks to Bezos and they suddenly each have a million bucks of cash in hand?
Basically, 2-3 classmates of mine shaped 90% of my view on what a normal family vacation is supposed to look like. Whereas actually, half my class didn't leave the country in any given year, especially if they had renovations or car repairs going on. I later learnt some of the parents were financing even the bus and cinema ticket for one of the girls on a one-afternoon class trip.
No, young people are not buying their first home. Despite that, yes, it is actually easier for them to buy. What is stopping them? I would say mainly the expectation that housing prices will drop further as the economy is going further down the drain, leading to better buying opportunities at a later time.
It’s the absolutely most valuable thing in the world. It increases in value constantly due to finite supply.
Yet you are allowed to buy it for a one time cost and own it FOREVER.
And there’s zero cost to owning it. Only upside of charging rent.
All the taxes we pay are for buying land or earning money. If you just already own everything, you pay nothing at all.
In the latter 20th century we had 80% tax rates.
> Are we still better off than soviet Russia?
That's the wrong question (a very poor state to aim for!). The right questions are: are we better off than we were? And are we as well off as we could be?
> It so easily becomes: capitalism = bad
It so easily becomes "capitalism vs. communism". Where is our imagination to dream better?
(both are bad in my opinion, and for similar reasons (centralisation of power))
Establishing the US as the global reserve currency had little if anything to do with where gold was stored, and far more to do with US economic and military power generally in the post-war era.
The mega trend of people concentrating to largest cities also occurs in Finland. The housing market in Helsinki (where I'm unable to sell my place!) is much better than the housing market in more rural areas.
Refurbishing them to a modern standard, of course, is quite a different story. Perhaps €100K EUR in a lot of cases.
Even me with my seniority most likely won't pull more than 1 500€ netto at most places.
There are a lot of levered rich people. Musk would be screwed if he got margin called on Tesla.
(I mean, unless there's a federal ruling that it's unconstitutional to let a Musk and his money part ways.)
Even if Musk filed bankruptcy yesterday, he would still end his life a multi-billionaire.
I'd expect that if you look at your wealth instead of your income, you probably come to a similar conclusion. If you are in the top 20% income bracket but do not feel rich, my guess is that you are probably in a lower wealth bracket (i.e. you have a house but still a huge mortgage on that house and not a lot of other assets, putting you somewhere in the top 40-50% wealth bracket.
If your wealth puts you in a similar bracket as your income (i.e. top 20%) and you still don't feel rich, this is more a case of your perception being out of whack. Top 20% in terms of wealth in a society like Germany by definition makes you a very rich person. But even our millionaire future chancellor described himself once as "middle class", so this is a common mistake to make ;-).
90th percentile 65 year old has perhaps $1M+ in accumulated property wealth and retirement savings.
There is some generational inequality at work, but that 65 year old also had ~zero at 21. The 90th percentile 21 year old will likely be doing very well by the time they're 65, hard to say whether better or worse than today's cohort.
But in any case, with longer lifespans, many/most won't see inheritance until their 50s, 60s, even 70s, long past what are arguably the most expensive years (buying a home, raising kids and so on). Maybe in time to pay college fees, depending on when they have kids. Even for the relatively wealthy, it's the luck of the draw - healthcare and senior care costs many hundreds of thousands for some, and virtually nothing for others.
I am very grateful for my current company's "unlimited" PTO policy, it's life-changing.
It can be a slippery slope for sure, I think it only works when the entire team buys into the notion that life is always more important than work (which can feel rare over here).
Happy to say this has been working for me and if the attitude started to change, I like to think I would speak up pretty quickly.
In both cases, what eventually resolved the matter was not banks spontaneously restoring solvency, but the central bank, that is, the financial entity capable of creating new money out of thin air, which reliquidated the banks, greatly assisted in the earlier instance by vast increases in government spending as a consequence of WWII.
There's a group who likes to preach loss of faith in the US dollar; their predictive record has proved quite poor. Despite this it remains an inexplicably popular trope.
I keep "my money" in a few different places. I keep a spreadsheet and every 1st of the month I 'do the rounds' and add the numbers of deposits, investments, '401k', etc. so I keep an eye on my 'net worth' on a monthly basis. When COVID happened and I saw that SP500 tanked, I bought more than my typical 'monthly purchase'.
Now, I am a nobody and worth a little. Someone who had $50m in the bank, well connected, and with access to info, 'went in' for x1000 what I did, at a better timed entry and left at a better timed exit made big bucks.
I am definitely part of the top 1% (8b people --> 80m)(considering that majority of the planet lives 'poor')(my definition of 'poor' was redefined when I visited the Philippines and saw a family of 4 live in a carton box from a fridge).
"We" here in HN (most of us) are in that 10% of the global population, whether we like it or not. And it's not because "everyone living in the EU is rich", it's more like in so many countries for majority of the people their income is well below $upper-tripple-digits.
This is not true at all. Where is your source for this claim?
>he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.
But don't you think that your (grand)parents may have been more motivated due to having children and grandchildren? Now, why an old, childless lady or man, living on pension, would take risks, especially when they lived their life watching things taking shape? Again, some will act on principles they believe in, but such people are always a minority. And I doubt people in age of your (grand)parents constituted a bulk of protesters.
I am from Poland. When mass workers protests were happening under communist regime, age median was under 30 yrs. Today it is over 40 yrs. Even excluding other aspects (like liberal ideology taking a firm hold here, and real economic growth that happened since), people today are much more complicit, and much less willing to take direct action, even if today's government is much less likely to beat you to death in jail.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the French Revolution was done by the rich born into nobility (even if minor)? Even if the rich still had an advantage during the entire turmoil, I think it's hard to argue that for the decades after 1790 that there wasn't a huge boost to social mobility.
Citation needed. This seems highly implausible.
Wealth is mostly inherited, and amassed over generations. The wealthy become more wealthy because they already have wealth. If you take that away, all those wealth management skills matter a lot less.
"from rags to rags in three generations" etc...
If everyone has equalish wealth then yes. Otherwise the hive mind becomes weighted by each person's wealth...
> This distinguishes capitalism from other systems like communism, which rely on a small number of central planners to make necessarily imperfect decisions for everyone based on limited understanding of the entire economy and all its participants.
...which ends up not being very different at all to communism in this regard. Your billionaires become your central planners. Except they're not even trying to make good decisions for other people in most cases.
Now, granted, power in western democracies in 2025 is less centralised than it was in soviet Russia, but it's a hell of a lot more centralised than it was in the 70s and 80s. And currently it's only getting worse.
What makes you think everyone's opinion is equally important in the economy? Some people do more important things than others, and thus their decisions must be weighted higher. Otherwise, inefficiency would be created.
>...which ends up not being very different at all to communism in this regard. Your billionaires become your central planners. Except they're not even trying to make good decisions for other people in most cases.
If we're talking about billionaires who get rich through honest business, then they are by definition great planners who are bestowed money through satisfying the needs of many people. They can lose their money. They also only do part of the planning... Most of the decisions about what ought to be valuable are made by all the other participants in the economy. The billionaires are just the tip of the spear when it comes to actually doing big picture stuff.
>Now, granted, power in western democracies in 2025 is less centralised than it was in soviet Russia, but it's a hell of a lot more centralised than it was in the 70s and 80s. And currently it's only getting worse.
Western countries have been outsourcing manufacturing and automating everything which destroys jobs for short-term gains. It's not exactly the work of billionaires. It is more like a failure of people at every level to choose their countries over profits. Protectionism is one market inefficiency that I think we need.
Parents get the bed and me and my brother would decide between the sofa and the mattress (or share a second double bed)
Even if adjusted by all those things the median American is doing very well while the Japanese are about on par with Southern/Eastern Europeans these days.
This set off the greatest period of wealth equality in the US, through a combination of factors:
- Strengthening the power of the Federal Reserve to re-liquidate banks.
- Direct government employment of individuals, whether through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Civil Conservation Corps (CCC), and eventually of course the armed forces as the US entered WWII.
- Enormous strengthening of labour rights and unions within the US.
- The US stepping in as the world's leading manufacturer in the post-war era, having its industrial plant intact, raw materials available, and demobilisation providing for a vast increase in the labour force itself without wage reductions.
- Generally progressive policies in government regulation, civil rights, educational access, housing access, transportation improvements, and healthcare over the period 1945 -- 1975.
- A highly progressive tax policy.
Not all of that is obviously replicable today. The US faces strong disadvantages relative to other countries in raw manufacturing (though can produce very-high-value goods which make up in trade value what they lack in sheer tonnage) and demographic challenges (along with much of Europe and advanced Asian countries, notably Japan, Korea, and China). But other options remain available and to my mind useful. Changes in tax policy to re-distribute aggregated wealth and make tax havens (both onshore and off) far less viable would likely be good starts. These are of course politically challenging, particularly under present circumstances, but might remain within possibility.
With the transition from conscripted militaries to autonomous robotic weapons, there will be no more humans refusing to execute orders and no more traitors.
A future revolution will succeed only against a grossly incompetent government.
So, no, there will always be some programmer Chuds willing to write the "kill all the leftists/organizers" functionality.
And they will sleep soundly.
It's one of the refreshing things about the crazy rightoids of late, how they emphasize how their larp revolution will cash out and retire enemies of the state.
But here on HN we get ESL-Occupy Wallstreet jeremiads that'd make Sorel blush.
I’m sorry, I don’t know how old you are, but I’m sure if you look back, you can think of examples in your own life too. But again, it’s just a stupid thought that I live with, and try not to compare current affairs to something in the past for that reason.
In all of those phases, safety and health of yourself and beloved ones are likely at the top of your needs. Is there a contradiction to your ideals when you were young (unless you went all in on YOLO)?
edit: Maybe it’s about the inclination towards uprise/revolution which might result in oppression and danger for those you want to protect. In that case: I don’t see why some kind of apocalyptic revolution must be part of the cycle mentioned in the top post. Maybe I’m still naive, but I still have hopes that we will get to sustainable terms on this planet.
I don’t think any of them were my priority when I was under 20. Health of my beloved ones became more important only recently, as my parents are way older now as well. And older people, on average, are more likely to have significant others to care about and etc.
But yeah, less time and thoughts on how to change the world and etc. as well. I’m not really sure how to explain it, if I’ll be honest, sorry. Just 10 years ago I was a different person. 20 years ago, I was even more different than today.
Also I’m not referring to people who voted for the lesser of two evils.
When a poor person votes for a ultra rich person that it is completely against the poor persons self interest because the rich person will make policy to favor himself as a rich person rather then others as poor people.
I hate extremist liberalism too and this is completely orthogonal to that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arms.
Perhaps but IMHO it’s a very high risk strategy and I doubt it’s necessarily optimal if more wealth is his primary goal (as opposed to his other seemingly highly megalomaniacal ambitions..)
So far his actions haven’t really been that beneficial for Tesla (of course its sales growth might have significantly slowed down even if he stayed out of politics). SpaceX can only make that much even if it gets to appropriate the entire budget of NASA. Also at the end of the day his and Trump’s relationship might fall apart any day.
He’s motivated by power, and the fear of power being taken away.
Owning people is the easiest way to become wealthy. Owning land is the second-easiest.
But it is also totally irrelevant, because the point is that Washington was one of the richest people in America before the war started and even richer when he died. There is no doubt about that.
I'm doubting the different and very specific claim that "George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War" with just a third of his wealth.
To me, the math simply does not add up. I suppose it can be chalked up to hyperbole ?
I also don't see how a discussion of the Iraq war could be relevant to that claim ...
I think the competition idea works at the level of a country if people by and large play by the rules (a big if).
It does not work at the level of macro economics.
If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose.
Thus in a world of competition, every country will strive to get nuclear weapons to be able to compete militarily and then given that we're human, we will have conflict sooner or later and it will result in nuclear holocaust.
If you think fair enough but nuclear holocaust is just the price we pay and it's worth it to continue doing competition, then alright.
I don't think it's worth it, so there needs to be a fundamental re-think how we approach these problems.
---
Regarding wealth inequality specifically - I agree with Aristotle who made the distinction of Aristocracy vs Oligarchy. Aristocracy being the rule of the few for the common interest and Oligarchy being rule of the few for the interest of the rulers.
Somebody will rule, it's the intention and overall direction that matters. I'm not sure that just re-distributing wealth addresses the problem - it does strike me as something an Aristocracy would surely do if one were to appear, so that much is well and good.
The assumption here is that megacorps are a competitive advantage. Let's look at a counterexample.
Suppose solar manufacturing is a growth industry. China wants to dominate it, so they subsidize it. Is there now a single megacorp in China that makes all the solar panels? No, it's a competitive industry there, but because of the subsidies that industry outcompetes the industries in other countries, with the result that China as a whole makes 80% of the world's solar panels. Others can't compete because of the subsidies, not because of a monopolist. Or, after the subsidies have existed for long enough, because the whole supply chain ends up in that country and other countries don't have the local knowledge or infrastructure to even do it anymore. So that kind of subsidization is a problem, but it's a different problem and "you need your own megacorps" is no solution.
Now let's go back to Oracle. How is it that they make so much money? The premise of copyright is you get a temporary monopoly in exchange for creating something and that allows you to recover your costs. Originally this was 14 years; it's not so temporary anymore. Also, the premise was that you sell a copy and get money and then if you want more money you need to create more works.
How does Oracle actually work? They don't sell you a copy, they sell you a license. The law allowing this was a choice, and a bad one. Having a monopoly isn't illegal under the antitrust laws; abusing one is. But doing that with the copyright monopoly is largely ignored, which is what license terms more restrictive than the copyright statue do. So instead of buying some database software for a one-time fee and then being able to use it as long as you're satisfied with that version of it, you get a temporary license that expires if you stop paying a recurring fee. Meanwhile your data is now in a proprietary database with high costs to extricate it, so you're locked in.
Is Oracle then out-competing all of their smaller competitors? Not really. Tons of people use Postgres or MariaDB or SQLite, and there are several other proprietary databases as well. But Oracle still gets to stick it to all the organizations that are locked in to Oracle, because the industry lobbied for laws that allow them to.
And then you also see Oracle sticking it to organizations in e.g. Europe. Is that because Oracle's size allows them to outcompete smaller companies this time? No, the same competitors are still there, it's because Europe has similar laws that allow the company screw their customers in similar ways, instead of limiting copyright to the selling of copies.
By contrast, if you look at something like Visa and Mastercard, that's a major duopoly in the US. And those cards are accepted in many other countries, but they often have competitors there, when those countries have laws that facilitate competition. Because the companies get big by laws that thwart competition, but when that's their advantage, the advantage doesn't stick where those laws don't exist. If anything it puts them at a disadvantage because being insulated from competitive pressure domestically makes them unresponsive and inefficient.
Which is why corporations are always lobbying to have the laws that prop up their concentrated markets enshrined into international treaties.
> Somebody will rule
This is the assumption most in need of being challenged. "There must be a king" is a fallacy. There will either be a king, or there will be a population of people dedicated to preventing anyone from establishing a throne.
The latter is what you get from a system of well-devised checks and balances, one of which is competitive markets. Emphasis on competitive.
I don't think you've tackled the problem of if we're playing competition and they build nukes, we need to build nukes. It's a zero sum game and the result is nuclear holocaust.
Do you disagree with the premise and if not, what is your proposed solution?
Regarding there must be a king - I think it'd be helpful if you could summarize your political stance in a few short sentences. I'm worried that we'll be hopelessly lost discussing minutia otherwise.
ps. I've been here a while and always been a fan of your comments :)
- People who are cruel are not fit to make important decisions in human society
- The most important quality in a human's life is dignity
- There needs to be a return to spirituality and philosophy, away from religion and tribalism
These ideas if contemplated and thought through on an individual and collective levels would undo much of what makes modern living unpleasant and bring about some wonderful new perks :)
So many people outraged but very few offering any context or insightful suggestions. Assisted by social media insane demand for controversy and dispute ( even without bad actors tweaking the algorithms), there seems very difficult for the sane rational voices to gain attention.
While i agree with you generally (blaming domestic problems on unpopular minorities or foreign enemies is a playbook as old as time), im not sure i agree that those issues are based on class division. Large swathes of America seem to be genuinely opposed to public healthcare. As a non american it boggles my mind, but it seems pretty clear that a significant portion dont want that for whatever reason (i would say that similarly those other issues don't follow class divides all that much either)
Rule of thumb: it always, always goes back to class. No war but class war is a cliche for good reason.
> Large swathes of America seem to be genuinely opposed to public healthcare.
That may be kinda true, but most Americans actually want it [0]. They just have basically no representation in media or politics. These days we're 'lucky' if a Democrat gives healthcare the slightest lip service.
> (i would say that similarly those other issues don't follow class divides all that much either
They absolutely do. Most Americans want a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo vs Israel. The political and media class almost unanimously pretend that isn't the case, but it is.
Same with free education and housing. These aren't really debatable facts, or matters of opinion; you can look up the polls yourself. Americans want this stuff; our politicians and media do everything they can to stop us having them.
And that's despite the fact that the vast majority of media, traditional and social, is under the thumb of like ten ultrawealthy people.
0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/468401/majority-say-gov-ensure-...
If its politically convinent to view things in terms of class then of course everything gets traced back to class. But i think that is more about trying to fit every peg into a round hole no matter how square it is. As the cliche goes, if all you have is a hammer.
> That may be kinda true, but most Americans actually want it [0]
I dont think the poll supports your contention. Only 57% wanted it. I'm not sure where you are drawing the line between classes here, but its hardly just the upper class saying no.
But say you succeed. The wealthy sell their second homes with only a small impact on house pieces. Now your tax raises nothing (everyone sold) and the wealthy invest in something else. It's a marginal improvement in housing affordability but not a solution to societies problems.
Or maybe the housing market collapsed under all these forced sales and the wealth is gone, and a load of normal people are in negative equity and your tax still doesn't raise anything. You've made life better for non homeowners but you've also trapped a bunch of mortgage holders with expensive unsecured debt. That's not exactly perfect either.
It's not simple and I'm a bit tired of pretending it is.
This isn't me saying we shouldn't be trying to tax the wealthy, it's just that I'd really like to see a specific workable plan rather than hand waving.
The irony is that the countries which did substantially see their industry wrecked and received Marshall Plan or equivalent funds afterward turned into the most competitive post-war economies, most notably Germany and Japan.
The US managed to build out new infrastructure, where it couldn't convert its war plant directly (which in automobiles, lorries, locomotives, ships, and aircraft it largely did).
We saw spectacular greenfields development most especially in high-speed rail, first in Japan, then France and Germany, all of which saw both infrastructure and real estate valuations (the key obstruction to railroad rights-of-way) collapse after the War. (China's HSR build-out follows a similar dynamic, though with different reasons, as that country industrialised for the first time.)
(Edit: The US hasn't established HSR, largely I feel because its previously-transport-enabled real-estate became too valuable. It's not tractably feasible to buy rights of way in the US, alternatives such as subway construction are themselves phenomenally expensive.)
I'm not sure of all the reasons for the UK's relative economic stagnation, though I suspect it was a mix of WWI and WWII debt, not having its industry blown to splinters, being out-competed by the US, and losing its cheap inputs as the Empire collapsed and colonies were spun out as independent states.
(Edit: The UK didn't see an economic turn-around until the 1980s, largely as North Sea oil came online, a boom it managed to extend with financialisation of the City of London, though that was largely restricted to the London metro region itself at a cost to the rest of the country which is immensely backwards.)
It's interesting to note that the US's post-war boom began slowing in the 1970s (for reasons which are widely, and I strongly suspect mostly wrongly speculated upon, particular the goldbugs' hypothesis), whilst Japan and later South Korea's were just hotting up (the latter imploded with the asset bubble collapse in 1990), and later of course China starting to grow significantly during the 1990s.
But at the end of WWII, the US had huge productive capacity, largely non-obsolete factories, worldwide markets for goods, raw materials, and a largely intact workforce (vanishingly few overall war casualties), a situation few other countries could claim, and none at similar scale. This provided about two-to-three decades runtime before factors caught up with it.
And in light of the 1929 crash, helped both prolong the expansion out of that crisis and see that the rewards were widely distributed among socioeconomic classes rather than concentrated amongst the very wealthy. That formula's not been tried since.
(Edits: Note two late adds above, they clarify/expand my argument slightly, pre-empt some possible counterarguments, and shouldn't change the meaning significantly.)
> "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication."
This phenomenon, he states, is also a cause for the lack of proper politicking in the era of digital communication, since everyone can participate in a fleeting "shitstorm" there's no lingering narrative to keep the discourse on, internalise it, and enact change; people just move from shitstorm to shitstorm, each outrage is very ephemeral, and shit-flinging cannot enact any change or deeper discourse about the root causes that caused said shitstorm. Again, information is just additive and leaves no space for closing back on itself in a more general concept to be discussed about.
The "flood the zone" strategy seems to just attach itself to this quality of digital communication, using the ephemeral, narrativeless information to continuously drive an agenda, moving our attention into an ethereal moving target, we never get any sense of closure.
> "Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.
This loophole only works if you don't tax large company real estate holdings. Which would be dumb.
Of course this scheme would require for real estate taxes to also be applied to companies holding real estate. And why wouldn't they?
>The wealthy sell their second homes with only a small impact on house pieces.
This is not only about second homes. It is also about tens of thousands of rental properties. It is about commercial properties that are useful investment vehicles and thus get preference during rezoning, but which push housing further and further from the city center (except for exclusive luxury apartments). etc. etc. If the top 10% own close to 50% of the real estate, there are a lot of potential taxable assets if you target the super rich.
>Or maybe the housing market collapsed under all these forced sales and the wealth is gone
That doesn't make any sense. For the person living in it, a house does not become less useful if its nominal value drops by 50%. But it makes that house much more accessible to people looking for a new home.
>a load of normal people are in negative equity
How would that work? If I force a billionaire to either pay 8% p.a. tax on his real estate holdings or sell it, how exactly does this impact "normal" people? A "normal" homeowner would maybe have to mark down the theoretical value of his house, but he'd still have the same income with which to pay down his mortgage. And if he is forced to sell for whatever reason, potentially even at a loss, he'd still not suffer tremendously, because he'd pay much less for his next home.
>but you've also trapped a bunch of mortgage holders with expensive unsecured debt.
This can be solved through banking regulations, i.e. by forcing banks to offer repayment moratoriums if the equity of a normal home owner goes down without any fault of their own (i.e. because of market turbulence). At the same time you can force banks to hold more capital in reserve to reduce the chance of this kind of regulation leading to a banking crisis.
>It's not simple and I'm a bit tired of pretending it is.
Of course the solutions are not "simple", but the root problem certainly is (wealth inequality) and there are some clear guiding principles that you can use to develop new approaches.
>it's just that I'd really like to see a specific workable plan rather than hand waving.
Here in Germany, I know of at least three different NGOs that have been pointing to this problem for more than a decade now and have developed detailed policy recommendations, both on a national and E.U. level. I'd be astonished if there aren't similar proposals being offered in the U.S. The "how" is almost never the problem. It's more the commitment to actually go through with this. Usually this lack of commitment is covered up by (falsely) claiming that there is no workable solution.
What are the NGOs? I'd be interested to read what they recommend. I also appreciate your efforts to explain how this might work but there are still some big gaps (you may well have answers too but I think your can't fairly deal with a topic this complicated in an HN comment)
Perhaps so. But you're the one who made the initial claim so confidently and definitively. To now say "it's complex and based only on a few notes, and depends on how you want to see it" is basically the same as saying "my original claim was my spin on it, which I was asking everyone to take as accurate".
There is more to life than autonomous vacuum cleaners and possibility of having a talk with your light bulb.
But to be serious - yes, many things have improved, yet we re losing many others.
And there are many more of such indicators!
This "we are all better off" is partially true but helps to neglect valid criticism.
Do you really understand just how unequal it is? Most Americans vastly underestimate it [0]. And that's from 2013; inequality has rapidly worsened since. Do you understand the effects of that inequality?
> look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago.
I don't think this is true.
There is quality of life in owning a house, a family house. There is quality of life in having job security. There is quality of life in feeling safe letting your kids go outside in an urban environment. There is quality of life in not having record proportions of your populace behind bars. There is quality of life in being able to weather illness without filing for medical bankruptcy. There is quality of life in being able to support a family with an average wage. Etc.
0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20191016221950/http://www.people...
(I'm sure the parent isn't in this category, so I'm speaking in general.)
But the above blog post and study you linked to are misleading as well. For instance, wealth gets vastly skewed by age. The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1]. For anyone who knows anything about investing, this isn't very surprising. Steady investment will cause people's savings to grow drastically from when they start to when they retire. A vulgar look at the numbers can have people saying "person A has 10 times the wealth of person B!", without considering that person B will also reach the level of person A when they get to the same age.
That's not to say that age alone would simply explain all of the inequality in society, but it's a major factor and an example of why you need to actually dive into the data rather than running with the baseline numbers. When it gets ignored it's likely people are pushing a polemic and aren't genuinely interested in what's happening.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth...
Is that because they're older? Or is it because when 70 yo's were young they could go through college on part time work, buy a house with an average wage, and then have that house skyrocket in value because housing was turned into an investment vehicle?
Dig into those statistics, and look at how much of the €400k net worth is tied up in their homes, homes which they owned outright at 25-27 years old. That's unimaginable today. People that age are living with their parents.
Look at those statistics and compare the median to the average - the distribution is extremely skewed - you could even call it 'unequal'. 'Record levels of inequality' even.
Age isn't as much of a factor as the 'nerdwallet' blog seems to think; and to the degree to which it is, is a natural consequence of having had more time to work and invest during a boom period, then having a certain generation and class of people 'pull up the ladder' after them.
The US puts too much emphasis on homeownership for wealth creation.
Vacant en masse is happening a fair bit there are even some near where i live.
Mostly it's more people renting though.
The war on affordable housing is all around.
Where do you live? Even manhattan has vacancy rates barely above the 3% structural minimum and thats the poster child for "rich people leaving property vacant" complaints.
The problem really is that too many homeowners refuse to allow anything other than SFHs to be built near them.
The premise that they did would be something like, Android. Google has 90% market share in search and makes their money from cloud services and ads. They give away Android for free and then tie it to their services through the network effect of the Play Store and remote attestation. Competition for mobile operating systems is thereby destroyed because to compete with Android you'd have to compete with something free while overcoming a strong network effect, and if you somehow started to then Google has billions of dollars to pour into Android to make sure you can't succeed. Therefore their only competition is from Apple, another megacorp. How is your local market for competing operating systems supposed to thrive in this environment? You're screwed.
But you're not vaporized, you're still allowed to have your own laws. So suppose you're the EU, or you're the US and Google is hypothetically a foreign company, but you want to respond in a way other than just getting your own megacorp.
You would have stronger antitrust laws. Contracts to enforce the business models of these companies would be totally unenforceable in your jurisdiction. App store can't be tied to the device or the use of any other services, remote attestation is forbidden because it prevents the user's bank app from working on a competing device, etc. Absolutely no respect in the law for any attempt to enforce vertical integration. Copyright laws that require source code to be distributed to the customer with any software, to aid in reverse engineering and adversarial interoperability. Violations have penalties with teeth, like invalidating the company's patents and copyrights.
Then the small competitors in your jurisdiction have a chance. Someone can make an Android fork that can use any app in the Play Store and fund development by auctioning off the defaults for search engine or cloud services. Android forks which are actually developed as open source instead of just having the code thrown over the wall start to become popular there, and support multiple app stores which also start to become popular. Once they build enough of a network effect, people outside your jurisdiction start to use them. Meanwhile the people in the other jurisdiction(s) still beleaguered by the oligopoly start to look at your market with jealousy and erode support for the status quo there too.
Why do you think Apple is so intent on fighting the Digital Markets Act? It's not a perfect law by any means but the thing it's attempting to do is valid and if it succeeds, Apple is going to have more competition, which they're worried about precisely because it's a thing that could actually happen.
> Regarding there must be a king - I think it'd be helpful if you could summarize your political stance in a few short sentences. I'm worried that we'll be hopelessly lost discussing minutia otherwise.
There is always going to be a government, or something that acts like one. To prevent there from being a king, the government has to do two things: 1) Prevent competing governments from forming (of which monopolies or highly concentrated markets are an instance) and 2) Not Be a Tyrant.
The first one in terms of markets is a set of rules that keep market barriers to entry low and prohibit monopolistic practices etc. The second is a set of checks and balances within the government that constrain the thing with a monopoly on violence from itself being used for empire building or private advantage.
Designing this well is, obviously, hard, but nevertheless it's the thing to do.
> I've been here a while and always been a fan of your comments
I spend too much time here.
But yes, confiscation of all his property and even the gallows (fortunately or unfortunately for everyone else) is not a risk Musk is facing yet.
That and red states having an aversion to education.
Gold is, and has been, an exchange medium, in which national finances have been transacted, and a durable representation of wealth. It's useful in addressing balance-of-trade relations between state.
But the overwhelming wealth of states is in their internal and external production and international trade of goods and services.
Colonial-era Spain imported gold in vast quantities from the Americas, which did it little good as that didn't represent wealth but rather exchange capacity, and did little but bid up prices whilst reducing (in similar mechanisms to Dutch Disease and the Resource Curse) the real economic potential of the country (why raise grapes, cattle or other goods when you could get in on the gold exim trade instead)? Gold bankrupted Spain, ironically enough.
Britain's colonial trade focused far more on goods: spice, cotton, sugar, tea, grain, wool, lumber, saltpetre, slaves, and the like. Those are both directly useful and contribute to infrastructure. Two things Spains gold utterly failed to do.
Pre WW1 peacetime federal spending would be a godsend for working families.
But yes, likely motivated by power too.
The people who get to be billionaires are motivated differently to normal people. They are more like feudal kings.
If you want to live in a country with rampant poverty, homelessness, crime, etc then go to a country with low or no income tax. If you're not a lord in a feudal society then you're a serf.
One lasted about 70 years, turned a country from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities".
The other big one went from "agrarian" to "makes most of your smartphones, e-readers, etc."
But more than that, if your standard for "marxist" is "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes", then the UK, France, and Germany are currently also Marxist. The UK and France brings the number of permanent UN security council members who are "Marxist" to 3 (not 4, because Russia doesn't have those things today), and those plus Germany are the economic backbone of western Europe.
Also India. They've got two different Communist parties, the split being because one wanted to be more Marxist than the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India_(Marx... vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India — but by the standard you use here, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Congress is also "Marxist", which will probably annoy all three parties for different reasons. Anyway, they also went from "agrarian" (when they kicked my parents' and grandparents' generations out) to "nuclear powered, industrialised, have a space program".
Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.
So the USSR may not be making the point for you that you think it is...
To read about people standing up for their rights in a Marxist State read Robert Conquest's 570 pages of 'The Great Terror' - an account of the crimes committed against humanity in the name of the Soviet Communism that emerged from the 1917 revolution. 'We'll do it differently' is the usual response. Sadly this always leaves out appreciation of the human factor whereby charismatic leaders arise and are convinced they know the truth and the way. Before considering a revolution, ensure there's a solution for this human problem of leaders who lead the masses (they regard the latter as such) down a path that in retrospect is seen to be a disaster. Pol Pot, The Great Leap Forward, the Iranian Revolution. We need to sit down and think about this before taking to the streets.
How about evolution rather than 'eggs in one basket' revolution?
All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
You think I form my views for 'political convenience'? How strange.
People trace things back to class because that's the driving force behind so much of what's wrong with the world. It's not the majority of ordinary people who are fighting for stripping environment regulations, or clamoring to make defense contractors billions of dollars, or pushing to make torture legal, or fighting to give Israel more 2,000 lb unguided bombs. It's the .1%. And that isn't really controversial, or difficult to figure out.
When the political and media class are openly bought and owned by the .1%, refusing to acknowledge classes role in politics is profoundly silly.
> I dont think the poll supports your contention. Only 57% wanted it.
"Only" 57%? 57% is 'most'. By any and every definition.
And if you compare that to the ~3% (at absolute max) of media and political figures who argue for public healthcare, you may start to see what the problem is.
> its hardly just the upper class saying no.
Yes - because 99% of the media, owned by the .1%, work every day to convince people that healthcare for profit is somehow a good and clever thing.
The American health model is a sad laughing stock. It's a bogey man all over the world, a stark example of the perils of taking privatization too far. People in other countries are still cheering for Luigi lol.
This class war which we are all in (whether we are aware of it or not) has casualties; one of them is our more vulnerable and easily manipulated brethren. That's why it's "only" 57% - because lifelong propaganda does indeed have an effect, especially on the easily swayed. A lot of Americans don't even know that this is the majority view.
I think you are interpreting evidence to support your preferred narrative without considering alternative explanations. Which is what i meant by politically convinent.
> Ordinary people aren't fighting for stripping environment regulations, or clamoring to make defense contractors billions of dollars.
Ordinary (working class people) people who work in those industries tend to be ok with it (arguably that is what makes capitalism insidious).
> "Only" 57%? 57% is 'most'. By any and every definition.
> And if you compare that to the ~3% (at absolute max) of media and political figures who argue for public healthcare, you may start to see what the problem is.
57% is a little more than half, which suggests the issue isn't correlated very strongly with class given you are counting only at most 3% as upper class.
Remember that if this issue had nothing to do with class you would expect 50% support (assuming the actual relavent variable was equally present in the sample group). The baseline is not 0% (or 3%) as that is what would happen if it was a class issue in the opposite direction (what you would get if lower classes hated the idea). ~50% suggests it is not a class issue but has some other cause that is more evenly distributed in the sample group.
Obviously this survey is the wrong type of survey to determine much of anything since its not broken down by demographics.
> This class war which we are all in (whether we are aware of it or not) has casualties; one of them is our more vulnerable and easily manipulated brethren. That's why it's "only" 57% - because lifelong propaganda does indeed have an effect, especially on the easily swayed.
Convinent that anyone who disagrees is just being manipulated.
I'm not neccesarily even saying that is untrue - propaganda exists for a reason; it can be very effective. However if you assume everyone who disagrees is swayed that is a dangerous path. Its non-falsifiable. How do you distinguish between people swayed by propaganda and people who legitamently disagree. Hell, if you are going down this path, why do you assume the 57% that want free healthcare are the real preference instead of the swayed by propaganda group? When you start believing this type of thing it starts to become pointless since you can always spin it as if everyone agrees with you regardless of if they actually do.
Das "Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit" has detailed concepts for a broad range of taxation schemes. This is a working paper on taxing wealth that was first published in 2021, I think: https://www.netzwerk-steuergerechtigkeit.de/infothek/vermoeg...
They also published some thoughts and ideas for a global tax on Billionaires: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/international/21426.pdf
The political party "Die Linke" has long demanded a wealth tax: https://www.die-linke.de/themen/steuern/vermoegensteuer/
Thomas Piketty (a quite famous and well respected French economist) has proposed a global progressive wealth tax: https://www.cadtm.org/thomas-piketty-a-progressive-global-ta...
There is tons more out there if you are willing to look for it. Economists, politicians and activists have thought about the taxation of wealth for as long as modern economics exist as a concept. Wealth taxation was the original form of taxation, because it turns out that property can be hidden from the authorities much less effectively than income and you can be very rich (and have a corresponding lifestyle) with a nominally very low income. Which might be a reason that rich people love income taxes and spend a lot of money on convincing the general public that wealth taxes are the devil's own work ;-).
My concern is that if middle/upper income groups believe that a wealth tax will reduce asset prices through forced selling by the ultra wealthy, and they think that affects assets in their pensions/home/savings then they will not vote for it and therefore it won't happen. I'm looking for something which tackles this concern head on.
I'm not an economist. But from my point of view and based on what I've read about this the argument is relatively straightforward:
- Yes, if you tax the assets of the ultra-rich, the prices of those asset classes will tend to fall.
- That is the whole point of the exercise (in addition to maybe raising government revenues). You tax real estate held be the ultra-rich, because you want real estate to be affordable by normal people. But yes, it is likely that also the house or apartment of a "normal" home owner will decrease in value.
- This decrease will not be drastic or sudden, though. It might also simply come in the form of less value appreciation over time. If (like in the U.S.) the top 10% hold 50% of the real estate (presumably measured in value, not square footage) and increased taxes would lead to those ultra-rich to divest of half of that over the span of a few years, the effect on individual home owners would probably be negligible in practically all cases.
- You can minimize or outright eliminate downside risk for "normal" people with regulation: limits on foreclosures, direct subsidies for middle-class homeowners, etc.
- At the same time, if you succeed in lowering real estate prices, the upside is clear: For poor and middle class people, both renting and acquiring real estate becomes more affordable. If this policy pushes you above the wealth threshold required for home ownership, it makes a strong contribution to building intergenerational wealth. And if you remain a renter, it makes moving (and thus maximizing your income potential) much more accessible, because you are not bound to your existing lease (which is much cheaper than having to sign a new rental agreement).
So it stands to reason that wars will be as expensive as possible. It’s pay to win to a degree.
The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning.
It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to the French Revolution. One of many causes.
Certainly not. You could not print money out of nothing for a fairly long time.
Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off.
If the British had the kind of power that even half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded.
not only that, but to sniff out those with whom they transacted. This causes a chilling effect, because secondary sanctions cause just as much harm.
It's also why i am against removal of cash based, anonymous transactions. It is needed, so that the state cannot cut off citizens at their whim.
Euromaidan succeeded because it also had massive support and influence from the western powers and from the western(mostly US) itelligence agencies to make the pro-Russian regime change happen.
Similar to the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, it was a decades long effort from the US itelligence agencies, they didn't just sit around and wait for the local population to revolt.
People ignore how much external interference these revolutions get in order to make regime changes happen.
tbh British empire at that time still has Canada,India,Australia and not counting 'small size' territory they has, Yes they can supress American Revolt absolutely but it would be a burden and not cost effective at the same time. colonies is bussiness after all
if they can't produce wealth then why fought so hard to defend this land???
Did they, though... The Western media depicts all color revolutions as such movements, complete with 'the military speaking out'. They did the same in Venezuela and other places. The 'military guys speaking out' turned out to be Colombian mercenaries who put on the wrong Venezuelan army uniform and whatnot.
Having written that, so yes and no. As in, I don’t think there were many (any?) active service members. That likely would’ve been very dangerous. But people who had close and recent ties with the military, so could be expected to be regime loyalists, yes, plenty.
EDIT: I never follow Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus on “Western media”. I read Russian, so I follow a bunch of Telegram channels from those countries. The protests in Belarus were basically covered live.
Not saying it will turn out differently, but there are more guns circulating in the US than there are people. Nearly everyone has or can easily get access to a gun. US culture is also quite a bit different, celebrating violence, don't tread on me, etc...
Again, it might not make a difference, but I'm not sure those other situations are comparable.
Something else to note is that military officers swear an oath the constitution, not POTUS (like enlisted do). Asking someone to order or to shoot fellow Americans, particularly if unarmed, would definitely be a test. If something like that did happen, we would be entering a second civil war.
I always wondered why north korea is so stable. I think its a mix of military power, media control and chinese support.
Honest question, but do you know much about investing? The investment curve isn't linear. Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they do at age 30 [1].
Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3].
If you have evidence for why we should dismiss age cohorts, feel free to share it. All of the data I've seen shows that it's extremely important, and people who intentionally ignore it are pushing a narrative that doesn't match reality.
[1] https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/how-much-do-i... [2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g... [3] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...
What part of that justifies or explains away record inequality?
> Millennials have more wealth than previous generations _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[2]. Generation Z is earning even more than millennials _at_ _the_ _same_ _age_[3].
Hm - might that be because they live with their parents and can't afford kids? Or because they're sharing an apartment with 5 other people, and having a lot less fun in their life (aka, quality of life).
And are we ignoring the difference between average and median when cherry-picking statistics?
> If you have evidence for why we should dismiss age cohorts, feel free to share it.
My argument isn't that we should ignore age. I never said that. No one said that.
It's that even accounting for age, however you want to do that, there's an extremely problematic level of inequality.
America has 10 million hungry children. Half a million people claim medical bankruptcy every year. There's no excuse for that - and now a cabal of billionaires is gutting Medicaid to help pay for a $4tn tax break mostly for the top 1%.
As of 2023, the top 1% of U.S. households held 30% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% possessed just 2.6%.
This is all deeply psychotic. It's perverse and abnormal in the extreme; and no, it's not explained away by age demographics. It's very intentional bipartisan policy, inflicted against the will of a large majority of Americans.
> Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.
Yes, and? I don't feel a need to claim the USSR was in any sense "nice" or "wise" or anything else like that. They were awful in many, many ways.
If my point had been about niceness, I could of course also point out that at the same time, the USA was still in the middle of saying "well obviously black people need to have separate bus seats" and had yet to end redlining policies, while the UK had yet to fully internalise that perhaps the people in the colonies who kept shooting the troops might possibly not like what we had done and were continuing to do with their homes.
But such was never the point I made in the first place.
Think lower on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Famine is the default, that everyone used to suffer on a regular basis. The USSR, India, China, these are all countries had all been suffering from mass famines at the start of their industrialisation, and compare them to how Ireland was part of the UK when the potato famine happened: The Soviet famines were 1930–1933 (including Holodomor) and 1946–1947 (which was partly due to WW2 and a need to not look weak due to very legitimate fear of America at that point); the Chinese one was the Great Leap Forward in 1958-62 (the CPC only took power in December 1949); the last really severe Indian famine was 1943, just before the British were made to leave.
Then think of the housing stock. Of electricity. Of plumbing, even (even today, Russia's % of that is pretty low). Pre-industrial societies basically do not have mass plumbing — can't pump sewage away without power. Toothpaste is important, but it's way down the list compared the radical improvements to quality of life that these governments brought their people (which is not to say they therefore are above criticism, they're absolutely fair game for criticism!). Even good nations aren't above criticism, and the USSR wasn't even good. The USSR in particular had huge avoidable problems caused by their own censorship preventing themselves from fully understanding how badly wrong their own policies were.
Even despite all the stuff the USSR did wrong, they still made things a lot better than what came before. (Unlike, say Pol Pot, who was an unmitigated disaster for Cambodia).
That the USSR was, and China now is, able to reach the point of challenging the USA for hegemony, is nevertheless a national success story. Despite both being flawed. Likewise India now having a GDP higher than the UK, even if they're still a long way behind on the per-capita front.
You can use power to get people to do they would not otherwise do.
Generally, if money is able to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, there needs to be some sort of duress, or corruption. People who are content with what they have don't resort to prostitution or otherwise compromising their principles for money. Those who are held under crippling debt, or who come to have no principles, are much more inclined to do so.
Power is more subtle, and it is related to money, but no, they're not the same thing.
That's SO very different than every other color revolution, including the ones the US attempted in Cuba by creating a fake twitter.
I hear much about the latter. The right to freedom of speech vs. the obligation to not defame, to not pump up your own share price, to not leak state secrets, to not openly call for civil wars in foreign countries, etc.
The right to bear arms, vs. the obligation to keep them locked up so kids can't play with them.
While I share your opinion that revolutions are generally bad and messy things, there's plenty of people who think the rich are failing their obligations to the society which gave them the right to own property.
That's the premise of social democrat parties, and the UK Fabian society (named after Roman general Fabius "the delayer") & Labour party!
Revolutions only happen when peaceful change is thwarted.
Of course, America is the least fertile ground for a left revolution. It's in the middle of a right-populist one.
Hence why the illusion of change and propaganda/political marketing is so, so important
Just make sure people are busy believing everything is changing all the time. Wear them out
It was a nice sovereign republic while it lasted, or so I've read.
Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.
Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.
Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.
Or any number of other scenarios.
I know you're not the person who responded with that conflation, but if you were, to ask if Lenin would agree with that assessment is a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
You can't separate these things and expect the world to make sense. When the ultra-wealthy capture too much of the levers of power, and strip-mine all our potential just to get a bit more in a bid for total control, quality of life for humanity suffers.
We've been suffering for it, as I explained above, and we're going to see a lot more of the same. House prices could double in the next 5 years. Even if you own a house or 6 and think that's just great, society will suffer and quality of life will fall.
You might think that owning houses, starting families, clean water, living oceans, a habitable biosphere and healthy division of power don't affect quality of life, but I promise you, they do. And those things are suffering, because of the level of inequality we have reached.
... Let's say, being generous and ignoring a lot of negative externalities, that we actually have improved average quality of life by 10% over the last 50 years. Put that in context - productivity has doubled. Where did all the difference go? ... And what are the beneficiaries of this wealth doing with that money?
The level of inequality is huge, and rising rapidly. That comes with a very serious level of existential threat to life on Earth itself; not just its quality.
Fwiw, I think there is a upper bound where inequality starts hurting the average (we aren't near it) however all the solutions I hear are worse than doing nothing. The government forcing equality by taking from one to give to another will never work. It's been tried and it fails horribly.
If the public knew everything the CIA was doing, they would be not very good at their job. Stuff like this is usually declassified only 50+ years later or sometimes never. So please, let's not use the "I've only seen Russian agents in the streets but not CIA" as some sort of argument since that insults everyone's intelligence.
APCs take fuel, require men to run, and need tires or tracks. For $10 worth of chemicals or a little bit of camouflage and some earth work you can make the APC irrelevant very quickly.
Happened in Iraq all the time.
The US military and its members have spent almost 25 years fighting through insurgencies.
There are millions of combat vets.