Inequality is off the charts in western civilization. There is a bigger wealth divide now then in the times of the robber Barons of oil and train.
Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical.
It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control.
The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.
Back in the feudalism days the ruling classes typically took between a third and a half of what the serfs produced[2] which is what is happening now as rents are taking over 30% of take home pay in many areas of the country.
> This means that 37% of the average single person's salary now goes on rent, though this proportion is even higher in London: a staggering 52%.[3]
Considering there’s all the other taxes like council tax, income tax, vat and whatever else, the average worker is most likely paying the same amount (or possibly more) to the ruling classes that they did in medieval times.
It's not "almost" modern feudal like system. It is. No other way of looking at it.
>Back in the feudalism days the ruling classes typically took between a third and a half of what the serfs produced[2] which is what is happening now as rents are taking over 30% of take home pay in many areas of the country.
Did the serfs get free housing under feudalism? Otherwise you can't really compare how much the serfs were taxed compared to how much people today spent on rent.
>Considering there’s all the other taxes like council tax, income tax, vat and whatever else,
All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't.
> Did the serfs get free housing under feudalism? Otherwise you can't really compare how much the serfs were taxed compared to how much people today spent on rent.
That's what the third to a half of what they produced paid for, the right to live and work on the lord's land.
> All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't
No, but what "welfare state" did exist, such as transport infrastructure, was paid for by the lord, rather than directly by the peasant.
>That's what the third to a half of what they produced paid for, the right to live and work on the lord's land.
You realize that the "rent" you pay includes the cost of the land, as well as the actual building on top. My point is that comparing whatever serfs paid and got in return (ie. only access to the land) and what the typical renter today gets (ie. access to the land and a finished building) isn't comparable.
>> All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't
>No, but what "welfare state" did exist, such as transport infrastructure, was paid for by the lord, rather than directly by the peasant.
whoops my bad, missed a "get" at the end of that. The complete sentence was supposed to be:
>All of that funds social services and the welfare state, something that serfs didn't get
> You realize that the "rent" you pay includes the cost of the land, as well as the actual building on top. My point is that comparing whatever serfs paid and got in return (ie. only access to the land) and what the typical renter today gets (ie. access to the land and a finished building) isn't comparable.
I'm pretty sure most serfs were renting pre-existing dwellings.
And I'm not sure what you're getting at with this welfare state stuff. Yes we get taxed and receive things in return but so did the serf. The only difference is the serf typically only paid one tax for everything that also included his rent. Currently, people are paying the same amount as the serf did just for rent (30-50% or more) yet the landlord has no responsibility to maintain roads and any of the other basic services he did back in the day. Instead the worker has to pay for these things on top of what he is already paying the landlord. The only benefit the modern worker is getting over his medieval counterpart is better quality housing.
>I'm pretty sure most serfs were renting pre-existing dwellings.
Who built the pre-existing buildings? I somehow doubt that the feudal lords were pre-building the houses landlord style. Also, after the building is built, there's the cost of maintenance. Today, that's the responsibility of the landlord. I doubt that back in the day the serfs would be contacting the lord if they had a leaky roof.
>And I'm not sure what you're getting at with this welfare state stuff
That was brought up because the original commenter was talking about all the taxes that people have to pay.
>The only benefit the modern worker is getting over his medieval counterpart is better quality housing.
That's exactly the contention. Renters today are getting access to the land and a living unit that costs a non-trivial amount of resources to build. Serfs get access to the land and a mud hut. Sure, maybe if you work out the numbers the "living unit" part of the rent is actually trivial, but as it stands right now the numbers aren't directly comparable.
> Who built the pre-existing buildings? I somehow doubt that the feudal lords were pre-building the houses landlord style.
Yeah some building is going on. But a lot is getting passed down or rented out to other people when people die. If I remember correctly the Crown essentially seized all land with the Magna Carta and then diced it up as they saw fit and anyone in any existing dwelling was forced to pay or booted out.
> Today, that's the responsibility of the landlord
Er no it's not. The developer builds the property. The landlord buys it and rents it.
> Today, that's the responsibility of the landlord. I doubt that back in the day the serfs would be contacting the lord if they had a leaky roof.
Yes, this is true. But many landlords will also refuse to pay out to get certain things fixed. On top of that, you're also not allowed to modify the dwelling you live in if you want to see your deposit again. Which you probably won't because they'll make up some kind of reason not to give it back to you.
If you can't see the similarities to how medieval aristocracy and modern day landlords are bullying the rest of society for their own benefit and extracting the same proportion of money from them, then I can't be arsed to convince you.
I agree that comparing serfdom to market labor and housing isn't particularly enlightening. But there were reciprocal obligations involved that would be unheard of nowadays even in the most renter-friendly places. A lord would be expected to provide physical protection against bandits. "Evictions" were comparatively rare. In times of hardship, it was customary to provide what we'd now think of as welfare. Common resources like ovens and roads were expected to be provided by the lord.
On the other hand, serfs were also bound up in much more obligations than simply providing part of their income to the lord (e.g. it wouldn't be the lord building and maintaining the road that he had to provide). And they couldn't get up and leave, even in principle, if they had a bad lord.
1. serfs paying 30% (or whatever) of their income and getting a parcel of land and a mud hut that "didn't cost much to put up"
2. someone today paying 30% and getting an apartment unit that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and comes with electricity, plumbing and air conditioning
and concluding that the plight of the latter is basically the plight of the former?
Yes, because the modern day worker would be able to afford the former without paying 30% of his income if there were laws that strongly discouraged using property as an investment vehicle e.g exponential property owner tax, 0% for first property owned, 1% of land value for second, 2% for third, 4% for fourth, 8% for fifth etc. The issue is that those with capital are basically using their capital to bully the rest of the population, who cannot continue to exist without shelter, into paying high prices, that wouldn't exist if such measures were taken to discourage property hoarding.
Here's another way of looking at it. Imagine that medieval society had the same construction technology we have today. Everyone lives in modern homes, with solar panels providing electricity and their own septic tanks for waste, and their own water collection systems. Other than that, the social structure is the same. Is there much difference between that and what we have today? Or is one set of people in society essentially freeloading of the other?
>Did the serfs get free housing under feudalism? Otherwise you can't really compare how much the serfs were taxed compared to how much people today spent on rent.
Yours is the same misunderstanding that leads people to mistakenly think $40k shipping container houses are an answer to the housing crisis. It was always about land - its intrinsic scarcity and who gets to hoard it. Probably 10% of my rent is actually paying for the building.
Mayfair is hoarded by one man and his "right" to its rents stems entirely from violence - his ancestor helping William the Conqueror conquer England. In this sense feudalism was kept around the whole time - like herpes.
Control and ownership of land dictates the flow of parasitically extracted wealth - it's much the same whether I'm paying 2900 per month to a landlord in Maida Vale who doesn't have to work thanks to me (but somehow still can't be bothered to call out a plumber) or if I'm paying 1/3 of my income as a peasant to my lord.
>All of that funds social services
Social services have been severely eroded in the UK while the % spent on rent and taxes has sharply increased. The NHS is a wreck compared to what it used to be in the early 2000s and the social housing list is DECADES long.
These already eroded institutions are a hangover from the decades when unions has real power in the UK and in the next 10 years they will be eroded still further.
>Yours is the same misunderstanding that leads people to think $40k shipping container houses are the answer to the housing crisis. It was always about land, all along.
That might be the case, but the apples to oranges comparison by the parent poster is hardly convincing evidence.
>Social services are being severely eroded in the UK while the % spent on rent and taxes has sharply increased. The NHS is a wreck compared to what it used to be in the early 2000s and the social housing list is DECADES long.
That can't possibly be due to other factors, like the aftereffects of the covid-19 pandemic, or all the baby boomers retiring and requiring way more medical care? Not to mention that adjusting for inflation, population size and demographic structure, NHS spending is actually up since the early 2000s[1].
>That might be the case, but the apples to oranges comparison
More like satsumas to oranges. Land is still the key component of wealth extraction irrespective of whether the rents come with a house or without.
>That can't possibly be due to other factors, like the aftereffects of the covid-19 pandemic, or all the baby boomers
No, because those are not other factors they are scapegoats. Covid didn't ruin the NHS - that had been happening for years - covid just exposed the underlying frailty of the system and was an excuse to jam even MORE corruption into the system.
Baby boomers retiring is not responsible for an increasing share of the country's income being dedicated to rents.
I'm excited to see what kind of new scapegoats our leaders will come up with to rally the simple-minded once covid becomes distant history and the boomers all die off. Hopefully we won't get a re-run of that "it's all the [ insert ethnicity here ]'s fault" thing from the 1930s.
What. What do you mean by "free housing"? The serfs paid a land lord a portion of their labour in exchange for housing on "their" land. How is that different from the arrangement under capitalism today?
Renting an apartment today provides you with access to the land, and an actual apartment. Serfs back in the day had to build the living space themselves.
Thomas Pikkety's books (Capital in the 21st century, etc) are an excellent and comprehensive data-driven analysis that examines the state of inequality today, all over the world, compared to centuries of history.
There is a correlation between income and wealth. But it’s far from perfect. When you factor in things like inheritance (e.g. inherit a median home in CA that’s fully paid off from your parents, that’s worth $600k - it takes a really long time earning $100k/yr to save that much!) there are lots of low to middle income earners that have more wealth than some higher income earners.
Wage income is nearly irrelevant in understanding wealth inequality. It's easy for the working class (which we are!) to see someone else working and making $10M a year and to think, wow, that's where inequality comes from! But that's a rounding error when it comes to wealth inequality. It's capital formation driving it. A wage income in the top 0.01% is extraordinarily well-off, but it would never put you in the top 0.01% of wealth.
Isn’t getting “put” in the top 0.01 wealth essentially just winning the capitalism lottery by betting all your labor and assets on a single venture and having it skyrocket? There was an interesting blog post that said if the early janitors of Amazon took their wages in stock and held it they’d be hundred millionaires. In one sense the mega rich are way overvalued, but in another they “just” played a game we all typically agree too and they wagered harder than most think is sane and got lucky.
Hard work, intelligence, and preexisting resources are typically prerequisites, and then a whole lot of luck comes into play.
I suspect taking their wages in stock wasn't an option actually offered to janitors, and even if it had been, they wouldn't have taken it: unmarketable equity doesn't put a roof over your head or put food on the table. Bezos, on the other hand, could afford to take below market compensation (at least liquidity-wise) because he had a pile of money already from his time in finance.
Totally agree. It’s just an analogy to illustrate the gamboling nature of getting rich and how the starting conditions are more widely available than many people think, it’s just start to finish is very risky low chance of success. For example, as an average well paid engineer, I could afford to gamble with a lot of money and my company even offers reduced pay for extra stock plans but I don’t take it and I sell every RSU I get the moment it vests. And that choice means I’ll never get rich off the stock.
You’re missing my point - the imputed rent on a $600k home is like $4k/mo ($48k/year) or ~$60k pre tax. Who would you rather be someone making making $40k/yr with a $600k home free and clear, or someone making $80k/yr? You don’t need to talk about the super rich to see that the median California home dramatically changes the “income” distribution
Not just western civilization, everywhere inequality is off the charts. It's particularly haunting in developing countries like in India's Mumbai I saw homeless families with small kids sleeping on the railway station floor while some dudes were racing their lambos just across the road.
I feel this big time. I'm in the top 10% of income earners in Canada and yet me and my family are stuck in a small one bed apartment. We can't buy property as everything in the area would leave us very house poor, if we even qualify for the mortgage.
Me too. My parents made significantly more in their entire lifetime from the appreciation of a house they bought in the 1980s than they ever did earning a lower middle class wage. It's quite common, but not talked about in polite conversation.
If you have even a half hearted belief in meritocracy that represents a failure of epic proportions.
As a top 10%-er wouldn't qualify for a mortgage to buy the house I grew up in.
This wasn't an accident. The country has been on the road to serfdom and ever since Thatcher violently crushed the Labour unions.
I am in the top 10% and live quite comfortably in a house I own, provide for two children, and have some disposable income. I would say I live a similar quality of life that my art professor father did, who was making ~$35/yr over most of his career, which was a comfortable but lower middle class income at the time.
Part of the difference may be that none of us have lived in HCOL areas.
The most desperate people ive met in the UK are those that grew up in a HCOL area to lower middle class/poor parents, went to university and did average jobs and paid 60% of their take home on renting a bedroom.
They would tell me that their retirement plan was a bullet.
>If you have even a half hearted belief in meritocracy that represents a failure of epic proportions.
I'm curious, what do you think "half hearted belief in meritocracy" consist of? From the rest of your comment, it sounds like any sort of economic system where you can earn money without the effort of yourself (ie. investment) isn't meritocratic?
Pretty much. If that type of income dominates your economic system it murders the incentive to actually create value.
Doing well in your career means nothing because the benefits are a rounding error on the rewards of having wealthy parents or getting into bitcoin early or whatever.
Quite apart from being grossly unfair it's grossly inefficient to structure the economy so that unearned income is privileged and dominates.
I'm in the same boat and was so confused until I did the math what my lower middle class parents made adjusted for inflation and they had more real purchasing power than me.
Yeah I think the the number that clicked for me was the ratio of home price to entry level wage 50 years ago.
E.g. an entry level job on Wall Street might have paid $15k/yr and a really nice apartment was $150k…a 10x spread - today that entry level job is say $150K but the same apartment is like $3-5m closer to a 25x spread…
Pretty surprised at the difference in income in UK vs USA.
Top 10% in UK according to this article is 59,200 pounds [~$76,000] while in the US to enter the top 10% you need to make ~$173k. This is a very large difference. While I know that the UK provides certain benefits related to health care above what the US does I cannot think this comes close to $100k per year. The average cost of a house in the US is ~436k [which is insane] and the average cost of a house in the UK is $372k which again is pretty expensive.
Not really sure where I am going with this except to express surprise at what appears to be a massive wealth discrepancy between the US and what I had long considered its closest comparable economy. I had never really done the research though thus my surprise.
I wish we saw more comments like this. People in the US, particularly the Valley or those working at FAANG, don't seem to realise the extent to how good your salaries are in comparison to the rest of the Western World. If you want an English speaking country with income closest to US, you're better off looking at Australia. Total size of the economy is far smaller because the population is far smaller, but GDP per capita is far higher and the wealth is spread more evenly than the UK. To such an extent that the NHS is now worried because increasing amounts of medical staff are leaving the UK for Australia to get 2, 3 or even 4x salaries.
In the second video he mentions the rice isn't going to be wasted, but I was pretty grossed out when he shoved that keyboard in there. Of course the rice will probably be washed but, totally blech.
I would have just measured the rice with a scale. Counting it out is certainly more TikTok votes, but I have a scale to 3 significant digits and counting this one at a time seems like a waste.
Comically, I think I could order the scale with four hour delivery and count by weight faster than this person counted one at a time.
I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights?
This is their thesis:
> The focus of this book is on the larger group between the 1% and the 10%. These are the managers and professionals of our media, business, the third sector, political parties and academia and are just as influential. However, many would not recognise themselves as high earners at all. In fact, earning around £60,000 a year in Britain places you in the top 10% of income earners. Maybe you’re surprised you fall into this category, or are not as far off as you thought. But despite this group’s relative advantage and comfort, these high earners don’t feel politically empowered. They worry about their income and are anxious about the future.
Uh, yes? Aren't these just trite observations? Professionals who earn somewhat higher than average salaries live in nicer houses and drive nicer cars and go on nicer holidays but they are still stuck working for a paycheck like almost everybody else.
I get the impression the authors badly wanted to write a book about about income inequality, a subject they feel strongly about, and then tried (and failed) to come up with something fresh to say.
The meta point here is that academia has become fiercely competitive and that's why you see books like these getting written. CV padding by people desperate for tenure. I sympathize, but also wonder if we need yet another book rehashing arguments about wealth and income inequality.
> I feel like I've seen this article dozens of time before. Where are the new insights?
Why do there have to be new insights? Inequality has been a persistent problem, and it's only been getting worse. The problem needs to be consistently highlighted, not tossed under the rug.
It's like global warming. Researchers have known about it for a long time, and there are no "new insights" except that it continues to exist and is getting worse.
Especially when a legitimate criticism against the news media is that they are usually only after “new” stuff, and don’t spend enough time following up on ongoing issues.
I always struggle with conversations around income percentile as the implicit assumption in most cases is that they are pretty static (I.e. that a person at the top, middle, bottom of the scale remains there consistently).
The statistic I’d me more interested in is cumulative earnings adjusted for age + untaxed transfers/benefits (e.g. inheritance or public pension benefits).
The points the article raises are completely moot.
>Meanwhile, traditionally upper-middle class professions such as law, medicine and academia are threatened by automation, precarisation and increased competition in globalised labour markets.
Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy.
The New Zurich Newspaper had a very sobering article on how academia is loosing it's last edge, that of gatekeeping higher paid jobs in a globalized economy. A degree used to be an effective showstopper for upwards mobility, because not many could afford one. This might be europe specific, but conditions for undergrads from the middle class were abhorrent up until the mid 80s here in europe.
The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.
> The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status.
Because of the environment created by their parent generation. They're the ones pushing for ever more "professionalization" your honor! Where my parent's could have gone into the field I want to get into without a degree at my age, I have to graduate in order to attain any respect.
> Apart from this being the entire point of globalization, the attitude that an academic degree alone is a guarantee to a good income is one of insane privilege and entitlement. This is a take from someone that doesn't like that his humanities degree is worthless in a globalized Meritocracy.
I think you completely missed the point that the authors were trying to make, which is that being in the top 10% of earners isn't as "secure" as you might think, you could easily fall out of that position, and almost everyone would benefit from a strong social safety net. This is as true in China as it is in the UK or the US.
>The points the article raises are completely moot.
>Apart from this being the entire point of globalization
>The truth is that I don't need an electrical engineer or a compsci graduate from some no name university to obtain someone with a specialized skill, if some kid from Shenzen can do it for a fraction of the price. That's overstating it, but the comparison holds imo.
This is a rather old fashioned attitude. The United States has been furiously decoupling from China ever since Trump and that process has only accelerated since.
Russia has successfully decoupled from the entire western world. Mexico just became a larger trade partner for the US than China. We aren't globalizing, we are de-globalizing.
The jobs that fled to China will come back. The idea that they'll be returned to a robot is nothing more than investor copium - an uneducated presumption from people who have little to no understanding of what actually goes on in a Shenzhen factory.
This isn't just about China, the Shenzen example was exaggerated. What I meant was: Where I live I'm there's an insane dissonance where companies are on the one hand trying to only hire academics for jobs that they think require an academic skill, yet happily pay Hays/Accenture/$TEMP_AGENCY to procure workers for them when those academics can't be found or don't perform. They're not willing to give me a permanent job with competitive pay because of my lack of degree, but are happy to pay Hays 70-100€/h so they get me as a temp.. doing the exact same shit, pretty much in perpetuance.
In addition, Startups hire you as long as you have experience. We will see more of this in areas that don't require specific certifications.
>Russia has successfully decoupled from the entire western world.
Lol ask the Russian gov on where they plan on procuring chips after the war. Same for China. You need to be US allied to be allowed top notch silicon. In China this drives innovation at least, but Russia still hasn't been able to mass produce competitive silicon. Modern manufacturing processes are driven by automation, give it a decade and their industry will be lagging behind by a margin that's impossible to catch up.
>This isn't just about China, the Shenzen example was exaggerated. What I meant was: Where I live I'm there's an insane dissonance where companies are on the one hand trying to only hire academics for jobs that they think require an academic skill, yet happily pay Hays/Accenture/$TEMP_AGENCY to procure workers for them when those academics can't be found or don't perform. They're not willing to give me a permanent job with competitive pay because of my lack of degree, but are happy to pay Hays 70-100€/h so they get me as a temp.. doing the exact same shit, pretty much in perpetuance.
Yeah, of course.
"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."
-- Keynes might as well have been talking about IT procurement managers.
Just like nobody got fired for hiring IBM, nobody got fired for hiring Accenture, even though they absolutely should because they're probably the worst consultancy on planet earth.
Degrees also provide a degree of arse covering for hiring managers.
It’s like the book “Why Nations Fail”. The elites wind up wrecking things as soon as they can consolidate all the power.
They (stupidly) would rather have all of a small, shrinking pie, rather than sticking with a smaller slice of a much, much larger pie. Even if they themselves would have been better off taking the smaller proportion.
China has the same issue if not worse, they are also very fast heading to a be a nation of majority senior citizens. Meanwhile the US has one thing saving it, immigration, to keep it’s demographic pie more in balance.
Piketty's _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, cited in the article, remains a fundamental resource for understanding how we got here. It's really essential reading. Given all that, the solutions presented in his later books appear to be inevitable. As for whether we're in a new Gilded Age, I'd say the we're way past that: it's more like ancient Egypt under Pharaoh.
I saw some slightly different stats compared to what was on the page above. On the 'This Is Money' site they have a breakdown by whether you have children or not, and which percentile that places you in. I thought that was a pretty good way of putting it, because disposable income makes a pretty big difference in your lifestyle doesn't it? Anyway I've tried copy pasting the table and made a brave effort at formatting it here.
Percentile Single Individual Couple with no children Couple with two children under 14
10th £9,800 £14,600 £20,500
50th £19,700 £29,500 £41,300
90th £38,400 £57,400 £80,300
97th £59,700 £89,100 £124,700
Though rising interest rates offer hope to people like us to work our asses off to earn 100K+, pay half of our salary in taxes, yet can't afford house in London.
I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio.
All a decade of low interest rate has achieved is wealthy folks borrowing money to invest in houses and shitty companies that rely on government loans to fund.
>I hope the house prices crash to a reasonable to income to price ratio.
I doubt the big shots will let the housing market crash. The falling property prices are promoted as a negative in the media.
In Germany they're already propping it up to keep it from crashing because big real estate firms demand they can't loose and their political pawns will comply.
Last year I believed interest rates would never rise to a level that would cause stock market crash but it happened. It was faster in the US but BoE also reluctantly is raising & market now pricing in 6-6.5% terminal.
Last year, I also believed Liz Truss would get away with 150B of energy subsidies by borrowing away. Because most politicians in the last decade have indeed got away with it. Rishi Sunak as FM spent 400B on furlough, covid loans and eat out to help out (idiotic idea imo). BUT, she didn't.
These events have changed my beliefs. Math is never wrong, just that sometimes market is so complex and economy goes through cycles that it seems illogical but eventually, it will all even out.
I am saying anything that is not sensible will have to come back to equilibrium eventually. In this case, the income to house prices ratio has been severely skewed in the last 20 years. So either the average income needs to go up drastically or the house prices need to fall to a level that is reasonable or both! Now this happens dramatically in the next of couple of years or really slowly for the next decade or so is debatable & I don't believe in making predictions.
The relatively well off can't even keep a server online.
Silly article. It's basically claiming that since even the relatively well off are not doing so great nowadays due to inflation, etc. they may appreciate some wealth redistribution (to those even poorer) because they now understand inequality. (The article authors also imply inequality will lead to a revolt, aka. the stick).
Yeah, sure! You can bet the relatively well off which are feeling the economic heat will just love to pay more taxes and plunge even more rapidly on the economic ladder.
It is kind of a strange argument that the author tacked on at the end. No body is doing well these days, even people with relatively good incomes are struggling. You know what would help those struggling people? Higher taxes!
It was a really strange transition and kind of torpedoed the entire article.
This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else. This may be a comforting thought to some people but it is also not a defensible position. It doesn't hold logically and as far as I recall all the major religions discourage thinking that way - likely because it leads to bad outcomes.
Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work. We've seen how that plays out - the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues.
The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them. That is much harder to game and also fairer.
> This continues a common but remarkably greedy line of thought where the existence of someone, somewhere, with a billion dollars suddenly robs life of all joy for everyone else.
This is missing the point. It's not the "mere existence" of the ultra-wealthy, it's that the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society. For example: "while the top 10 per cent grew its share of total income by 7.6 per cent between 1980 and 2018 (from 28.5 per cent to 36.1 per cent), the top 1 per cent grew theirs by 6.3 per cent (from 6.8 per cent to 13.1 per cent), which leaves only 1.3 per cent of share growth for the rest of the top 10 per cent."
> The focus really should be on absolute living standards and how to raise them.
That is the focus on the article. The point was that the top 10% are not necessarily raising their absolute living standards, because most of the income gains are going to the top 1%, inflation is rising, housing prices are rising, student loan debt is rising, existence in the top 10% is often only temporary and precarious (think layoffs and other economic trends), and as the article says, "The children of high earners will increasingly see their position depend on, as Maren Toft and Sam Friedman put it, the “bank of mum and dad”, and on what they inherit, rather than only on their professional status."
Someone can easily fall out of the top 10%. It's a lot more difficult to fall out of the top 1% and back into the working class. Wealth begets wealth.
> the ultra-wealthy have increasingly been taking all of the economic gains in society
What, do only the ultra-wealthy have smartphones? High level the big issue is overpopulation. At the pointy end of the stick we have the crusade against cheap energy.
You can blame the outcomes on the ultra-wealthy looking after themselves, but fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting. Picking the ultra-wealthy as a bogyman isn't going to fix things. The ultra-wealthy don't have huge storehouses of food to feed the hungry. They don't have 10 years supply of cheap gas for everyone. They can't magic cheap goods out of the air without someone else working to build them.
> What, do only the ultra-wealthy have smartphones?
Everybody seems to cite smartphones as raising our standard of living, but as someone who lived a long time before smartphones existed, I'm not seeing it. In fact, I would argue that smartphones have overall made us worse off. We're like slaves to those little devices, unable to put them away, always with our heads down in subservience.
> fact is that most of the damage was done by policies people were out there vocally supporting.
Agreed. I wasn't "blaming" the ultra-wealthy, and neither was the linked article. It's merely an empirical observation that the system isn't benefitting most people. And the article discusses what to do: "High earners have two options. The first is to stockpile every possible advantage for themselves and their children. The second is to contribute to a common safety net that benefits everyone. While the latter looks highly unlikely in the current political climate, high earners won’t be able to isolate themselves from mounting inequality for much longer." Obviously, the authors favor the latter option: "Making our social services – our schools, housing and health – more efficient and equitable will help all of us through predictable and unpredictable phases of our life and in turn prevent inequality from continuing to exert such a huge drag on our productivity and well-being."
The point isn't really whether its a net benefit or not, the point it's a "luxury" of tens to several hundred dollars per month that is almost universal at this point that is not really comparable to any other discretionary purchase historically.
Is it a luxury though? Almost everyone needs a phone, and many businesses and other organizations basically assume that you have a smartphone nowadays, or at least have internet access, and a smartphone is one of the cheaper ways of accessing the internet, especially if you need a phone already.
A smartphone is not an absolute requirement in life, but what is? Food and water. Other than that, not much. After all, there are homeless people. But we wouldn't say that a home is a "luxury item" or "discretionary purchase".
But, putting aside your tone policing, do you see any flaws in the argument?
Pretend Elon Musk disappeared and you got your $8 allocation from his fortune ($180 billion over 8 billion humans), would that really make a difference to your life? Even for people living in complete poverty where $8 might be more money that they see in a year it is still a pitiful amount of real resources. As a one-off payment.
The existence of very wealthy people really isn't the thing holding back median living standards.
> The existence of very wealthy people really isn't the thing holding back median living standards.
What you're missing here is the power and political influence of the ultra-wealthy. They aren't just passive participants in the system. Rather, they actively shape the system to suit themselves. They can buy politicians. Or as you said yourself, "the ultra wealthy buy up a few media firms and then gently redirect all the anger towards the middle class and/or stirs up social issues." You mentioned Musk: he bought up Twitter, the influential social network, and has turned it into his own political propaganda machine.
I put it to you that not only did I hit that point, but you just quoted the part where I explained that very thing. You're citing my words to make a point that I was also making.
I don't think so. Your original point was "Poor people looking at the ultra-wealthy as a pot of money isn't going to work." And you just reiterated with "Pretend Elon Musk disappeared and you got your $8 allocation from his fortune ($180 billion over 8 billion humans)". But that's not what I'm talking about, and it's not what the article was talking about either: “when we are talking about redistribution, we are largely talking about redistribution from ourselves to ourselves at a different point in our lives and not from ‘us’ to ‘them’.”
The ultra-wealthy make too many of the decisions about how resources will be allocated in the system, i.e., which goods will be or won't be produced, and they try to rig the system to direct to themselves most of the economic gains of the system, to break and suppress labor unions, and to undermine and destroy the social safety net that the article authors (and myself) support, either to produce a desperate worker base willing to do anything, or just for ideological reasons.
It's not about redistributing their money per se, it's about breaking their concentrated power. Money is power. This is why the ultra-wealthy continue to accumulate money far beyond any amount they can possibly spend on themselves/family/friends for material goods and services.
I would say that 8 billion people each having 8 economic "votes" is vastly more democratic (small "d") than 1 person having 180 billion economic votes. Democracy itself is endangered by concentrated economic power.
> The ultra-wealthy make too many of the decisions about how resources will be allocated in the system...
The ultra-wealthy don't have a lot of choice in how resources are allocated. As just pointed out, Elon Musk has power of about $8 per human - relatively speaking that is an insane amount of power. Absolutely speaking it is not that much. Consumers and regulators have most of the power there. The ultra wealthy mainly control which people sit where in the social pyramid, but not what the pyramid then does.
If people allocate resources in a way consumers don't like they go broke really quickly. That is one of the reasons free markets are so successful - they punish people quickly and effectively for bad decisions no matter how much economic power they used have.
> Democracy itself is endangered by concentrated economic power.
Democracy is a tool to enable concentrated economic power. The most democratic successful society in the world is the US, ie, one that has consistently voted for lots of capitalism. The people who wanted to decentralise economic power were the communists and it turns out committees and big groups suck at making good economic decisions and lots of people literally starve.
> ...we are largely talking about redistribution from ourselves to ourselves...
On this point the article descends into nonsense. The authors believe this is a thing and will be proven wrong in an experiment.
> Consumers and regulators have most of the power there.
Regulators can be purchased.
> If people allocate resources in a way consumers don't like they go broke really quickly. That is one of the reasons free markets are so successful - they punish people quickly and effectively for bad decisions no matter how much economic power they used have.
That's not true. In fact, the wealthy are uniquely able to lose money for long periods of time, producing "loss leaders" to drive all competitors out of business and monopolize markets. In recent decades, this money-losing strategy has been weaponized time and again. It's practically a badge of honor for VC-funded startups to brag about how much money they're spending and losing.
It's also crucial to note that consumers are not an undifferentiated mass. They're not all the same. To go back again to your example of Musk, he become the wealthiest person in the world by selling a luxury brand to well-off consumers. Needless to say, Teslas are not cheap. It turns out that the wealthy catering to themselves is quite profitable, even if it doesn't help the non-wealthy much. And to look at another example, Apple became the wealthiest corporation in the world by selling luxury brands, iPhone and Mac.
> The most democratic successful society in the world is the US
I'm not sure I would agree with that characterization.
> The people who wanted to decentralise economic power were the communists and it turns out committees and big groups suck at making good economic decisions and lots of people literally starve.
Communist countries are not decentralized, nor are they democratic. To the contrary, they're extremely centralized. All power is in the hands of a small group of unelected (or sham elected) political party leaders. And you'll have noticed that both Russia and China have migrated from communism to capitalism while retaining their totalitarian governments. It turns out that political and economic systems are separate. There are plenty of other countries in the world as democratic or more so than the US but with significantly more socialism and social safety nets. The US is practically alone among industrialized nations in failing to have national health care, for example.
> On this point the article descends into nonsense. The authors believe this is a thing and will be proven wrong in an experiment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "will be proven wrong in an experiment", but it sounds like, uh, nonsense? It seems like a strange response, because you've already said multiple times that redistributing money from the ultra-wealthy won't get us very far, so doesn't it follow by your own logic that any significant redistribution of wealth in society and social safety net will have to come from the 99% rather than just the 1%?
Regulators can be purchased but I spend a lot of time arguing in that space on HN and even here, with a educated and erudite population, a lot of people generally support the regulatory strategies in place. The ultra-wealthy might be purchasing details but the voters are generally in favour of consumer power being lessened.
> ...this money-losing strategy has been weaponized time and again...
Sure, but that strategy is a side effect of policies designed to protect borrowers and drive up house prices - which are often some of the more electorally popular policies. I typically take the side of the argument that thinks that loss making companies should go bankrupt and let me tell you, people do not like the implications of that once they start getting laid out.
> Needless to say, Teslas are not cheap.
We seem to be having some drift in this conversation. Are we talking about the ultra-wealthy or people who can afford Teslas? I can afford a Tesla. I'd agree that people earning less than me has very little real economic power since they aren't breaking in to the middle class where most of the consumer activity happens.
> Communist countries are not decentralized...
You've misread, I never said communist countries were decentralised. They wanted to decentralise economic power away from the wealthy and repurposed it to the benefit of the people - that was one of the core tenants of socialism. Of course it didn't work, but that was one of the goals - pulling power away from people like Musk.
Democracies are decentralised systems that centralise economic power towards people who best use it. Mainly by voting with their feet. Keeping with the Musk example, there is a big contingent of people who think he makes the best car and they centralise a lot of manufacturing power under his leadership. Democracys are very flexible though and move power around quickly when it seems to make sense.
> doesn't it follow by your own logic that any significant redistribution of wealth in society and social safety net will have to come from the 99% rather than just the 1%?
Sure, but that isn't ourselves to ourselves. That is from one group (traditionally the middle class because most of the choices about resource allocation happen there) and to a different distinct group (historically varies).
There are no electorally popular policies. We vote for people, not policies, and elections are usually popularity contests rather than policy choices. Not to mention that the Overton window is extremely limited in many cases, especially under the US political duopoly.
> Are we talking about the ultra-wealthy or people who can afford Teslas?
The latter. The point was that one can become ultra-wealthy while still ignoring the vast majority of consumers.
> the middle class where most of the consumer activity happens
I wouldn't say that Tesla is a middle class phenomenon. If you divide the population into thirds, calling them upper class, middle class, and lower class (I'm not sure whether this corresponds with the "standard" definition of class, if there is a standard, but that doesn't really matter for this purpose), there's a ton of money to be made by selling to the top third of earners while mostly ignoring everyone else.
> They wanted to decentralise economic power away from the wealthy and repurposed it to the benefit of the people - that was one of the core tenants of socialism.
Who is "They" exactly? Of course Marx wanted that, but he was merely an academic, not the leader of a country. It's not clear that the actual leaders of Communist countries wanted to decentralize economic power, nor did they fully practice the core tenants of socialism. After all, the economy of the Soviet Union was literally termed "central planning".
> Keeping with the Musk example, there is a big contingent of people who think he makes the best car and they centralise a lot of manufacturing power under his leadership.
The total number of Teslas ever sold is fewer than 5 million, and many of those vehicles were sold to repeat customers. The contingent is not that big, compared with the overall population. In my view, this appears to be mostly the upper income bracket empowering the ultra-wealthy.
> Sure, but that isn't ourselves to ourselves. That is from one group (traditionally the middle class because most of the choices about resource allocation happen there) and to a different distinct group (historically varies).
This is missing one of the main points of the article, which is that being part of the top 10% of earners for example is not necessarily a permanent state of existence. It can be temporary and precarious. I've personally been all over the economic map during my lifetime. Economic status is not static.
Well, we could start with billionaires not buying houses to to use as investment vehicles. Being able to own their own home would be the single biggest way you could raise living standards for the poorest in society.
> It doesn't hold logically and as far as I recall all the major religions discourage thinking that way - likely because it leads to bad outcomes.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the incestuous relationship those religions have (both currently and historically) with the ultra-wealthy and other forms of aristocracy…
Quality of life has massively degraded in absolute terms. It has degraded because a huge fraction of productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average people is now dedicated to improving the lives of the extremely wealthy.
>Quality of life has massively degraded in absolute terms
by what metric?
>It has degraded because a huge fraction of productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average people is now dedicated to improving the lives of the extremely wealthy.
1. define "huge fraction"
2. define "productivity that used to be dedicated to improving the lives of average". I want to see statistics for it. If you're talking about government spending, US government expenditures as percent of GDP is either flat or slowly creeping up[1] in the past few decades. Medicare spending[2] has been creeping up for years and far exceeds GDP growth.
Quality of life across the entire planet has probably improved. Billions of Indians and Chinese have been lifted from gut wrenching poverty thanks to the shifting of the American manufacturing and services industry to these nations. As a result of this American living standards have decreased but it has also benefited a lot of people across the globe
What annoys me is that this becomes a simple accounting question. Inequality has only soared like this to the extent that we mark asset portfolios to market rather than to book. Somebody agrees to pay a bit more for a TSLA share and suddenly Musk's net worth has "increased" by a billion dollars, but he owns at the end of the day exactly what he owned at the start of the day.
If we just marked assets to book instead (which makes some sense because there's no way most whales could actually liquidate their holdings at their current price) the world's inequality would plummet.
The thing is that they never have to liquidate. They’re given an outsized leverage because any bank will lend them money with the assets as collateral, and they never have to pay tax on that cash (unless you consider low interest given to a bank tax).
Please stop focusing on inequality. What matters is whether the quality of life for the most impoverished is increasing or decreasing.
Consider: would you rather increase the standard of living of the poorest by 2x if it meant also increasing it for the richest by 100x (increasing inequality) or would you rather decrease the standard of living of the richest by 100x and also the poorest by 2x (decreasing inequality). A lot of discourse around inequality seriously proposes the latter (out of ignorance rather than malice).
A lot of life satisfaction is tied to positional goods: real estate, social status, political power, etc. For positional goods, relative wealth matters far more than absolute wealth.
If you have a population whose happiness is culturally tied to the stereotypical "single-family house owner with a picket fence and 2.1 kids attending Ivy League schools" lifestyle, then your latter solution (where everyone gets poorer) might actually be preferable.
I’m not saying anyone wants to fare poorly, but that it’s very hard to create a strong economy where it’s also impossible to fare poorly. There is always risk. Either the system is designed such that the risk can be individualized and failure can be individualized. Or risk will be communal and economic failures will be necessarily systemic. I don’t want to ever be homeless, but I’d much rather it happen to me than everyone. No one escapes a Great Depression.
I'm sure this sounded clever when you wrote it, but can you actually explain it? Are you really just trying to say "curious, you want diversity, yet you don't want people to be poor"?
It’s so intuitive to me that it’s hard to explain why economic diversity is a sign of a healthy economic system.
The best I can do is give examples. I’ve been to Disney World, and it was very fun and nice, and there were no homeless people asking me for money, and it was clean, and the windows weren’t broken… but it was also obvious that it wasn’t a healthy economy. I was paying an unsustainable price for that, those who couldn’t afford it were excluded, etc.
I’ve also been to somewhere in south america and (where I was) it was largely the opposite. There were people aggressively selling / begging, everything was dirty, buildings were in disrepair. This also wasn’t healthy. Everyone I saw was poor. That wasn’t diverse either.
Parts of Europe were largely a toned-down Disney World. There were nice areas with a fair degree of economic diversity and an absence of the very worst poverty… but then there were places I was cautioned to not go, places were the symptoms of an unhealthy economy existed and were hidden from public view. It was still fairly healthy. There was a lot of diversity. I saw a couple supercars, a bunch of neat European beaters, and a fair number of cars that I’d say were fairly average in the US but were clearly fairly to do.
Meanwhile theres virtually nowhere in the US that I cannot freely go in relative safety. I routinely see people from every walk of life… and the US is the strongest economy in the world.
Eliminating the diversity may be good for some people individually, but it’d hurt the whole. Of course I’m not saying that it can’t be too extreme, but people pursing an utter absence of poverty or utter absence of extreme wealth don’t know what they’re talking about.
Economic diversity helps. It means there are people with means, others with motivation, others with a mixture, etc. It creates a economic system where systemic needs are most likely to meet a person who can recognize and fulfill the role.
> The best I can do is give examples. I’ve been to Disney World, and it was very fun and nice, and there were no homeless people asking me for money, and it was clean, and the windows weren’t broken… but it was also obvious that it wasn’t a healthy economy. I was paying an unsustainable price for that, those who couldn’t afford it were excluded, etc.
I'm sorry, but in what way is Disney World an economy? You know that it's a fake place run by a single corporate entity, right?
> I’ve also been to somewhere in south america and (where I was) it was largely the opposite. There were people aggressively selling / begging, everything was dirty, buildings were in disrepair. This also wasn’t healthy. Everyone I saw was poor. That wasn’t diverse either.
Why do you think any of this is due to missing "economic diversity" instead of simply missing money due to geopolitical and historical reasons?
> Parts of Europe were largely a toned-down Disney World. There were nice areas with a fair degree of economic diversity and an absence of the very worst poverty… but then there were places I was cautioned to not go, places were the symptoms of an unhealthy economy existed and were hidden from public view. It was still fairly healthy. There was a lot of diversity. I saw a couple supercars, a bunch of neat European beaters, and a fair number of cars that I’d say were fairly average in the US but were clearly fairly to do.
And Europe is on average much safer than the US is, people are happier, fewer people die of preventable reasons. Seems like they are doing something right?
> Meanwhile theres virtually nowhere in the US that I cannot freely go in relative safety. I routinely see people from every walk of life… and the US is the strongest economy in the world.
Well, except literally all of the US.
> Eliminating the diversity may be good for some people individually, but it’d hurt the whole. Of course I’m not saying that it can’t be too extreme, but people pursing an utter absence of poverty or utter absence of extreme wealth don’t know what they’re talking about.
You haven't shown that ANY of what you wrote is due to missing "economic diversity". You've compared a bunch of places that have very different economic histories, and you just decide that all the differences are due to "economic diversity".
> Economic diversity helps. It means there are people with means, others with motivation, others with a mixture, etc. It creates a economic system where systemic needs are most likely to meet a person who can recognize and fulfill the role.
And now please explain how and why economic diversity helps. Why is it good if there are poor people? Why do you like it better when there are people dying of preventable reasons due to their economic status (US) compared to places where this doesn't happen (EU)?
> I'm sorry, but in what way is Disney World an economy? You know that it's a fake place run by a single corporate entity, right?
People buy and sell stuff. Disney is paying workers. I’m paying Disney. It’s all orchestrated by one controlling entity, but that also describes communism which I’d argue has operated a number of equally fake (albeit less successful) economies.
> Why do you think any of this is due to missing "economic diversity" instead of simply missing money due to geopolitical and historical reasons?
Yeah, their problem appeared to be a lack of wealth, and a lack of a middle class. There was plenty of poverty, but diversity isn’t code for poor. Diversity means some poor, some middle, some wealthy and they didn’t have much of the latter.
> And Europe is on average much safer than the US is, people are happier, fewer people die of preventable reasons. Seems like they are doing something right?
Hey, sometimes you don’t want to have the strongest economy. To use an analogy a race car is very high performance, fast, can turn quickly, etc. However a luxury car is more comfortable. Europe seems to prefer a nice balance where their economic system isn’t as resilient or productive, but it’s more pleasant for more people (while things are good). My concern is Europe’s ability to make it through severe economic / military hardships. Frankly they’ve enjoyed this comfort for the past 100 years because the US is doing the hard work of being the economic backstop of the world.
> You haven't shown that ANY of what you wrote is due to missing "economic diversity". You've compared a bunch of places that have very different economic histories, and you just decide that all the differences are due to "economic diversity".
Again I’m just making observations. I’m not saying that making people poor would improve the economy any more than hurting someone will make them strong… but exercising does cause discomfort, sore muscles, and the occasional injury. I’m saying if you don’t have any discomfort, soreness, etc. then you’re likely not as healthy / resilient as someone who’s exercising to that level.
> People buy and sell stuff. Disney is paying workers. I’m paying Disney. It’s all orchestrated by one controlling entity, but that also describes communism which I’d argue has operated a number of equally fake (albeit less successful) economies.
I'm not going to comment further on this line of thought because it's too ridiculous.
> Yeah, their problem appeared to be a lack of wealth, and a lack of a middle class. There was plenty of poverty, but diversity isn’t code for poor. Diversity means some poor, some middle, some wealthy and they didn’t have much of the latter.
And now please explain: why is it better for those places if some people stay poor?
> Hey, sometimes you don’t want to have the strongest economy. To use an analogy a race car is very high performance, fast, can turn quickly, etc. However a luxury car is more comfortable. Europe seems to prefer a nice balance where their economic system isn’t as resilient or productive, but it’s more pleasant for more people (while things are good). My concern is Europe’s ability to make it through severe economic / military hardships. Frankly they’ve enjoyed this comfort for the past 100 years because the US is doing the hard work of being the economic backstop of the world.
Ah, yes. They only fare better on the metrics I described because the incredible hard work of Americans allows them to. How thankful we should all be. It can't be that the US system simply performs worse on those metrics.
> Again I’m just making observations. I’m not saying that making people poor would improve the economy any more than hurting someone will make them strong… but exercising does cause discomfort, sore muscles, and the occasional injury. I’m saying if you don’t have any discomfort, soreness, etc. then you’re likely not as healthy / resilient as someone who’s exercising to that level.
But the observations aren't grounded in data. You haven't even tried to observe what might be wrong with what you wrote. What if it's not that "economic diversity" is good for a country (as again, you haven't shown that in any way), but it's the distance to the nearest country that plants coffee beans? I'm observing that is roughly true. Does that make it true, or even useful?
> And now please explain: why is it better for those places if some people stay poor?
I suspect it’s not so much a matter of being poor, but allowing the possibility of being poor.
If you do not have the freedom to fail, then you also have less opportunity to succeed.
For example, a government retirement program keeps the elderly off the street… but it also takes a percentage of their earnings while working. For many that might be the difference between being able to buy a house this year vs. waiting a couple more, or between starting a business and working for their current employer, between jumping on a good financial opportunity and missing it.
It also forces people to choose retirement over investing 100% into their children. This isn’t an argument to abolish social security, but an example of how eliminating the possibility of failure limits opportunities for success.
The key here is I think people are better judges of their financial situation than the government. If we had to solve economics problems with a computer I wouldn’t choose a mainframe with one set of rules for everything. I’d choose millions of distributed processors that were each able to evaluate their own situation and that could fail without taking down the whole system.
So, what happens when social security fails and nobody had retirement income? That’s the kind of problem that small scale poverty helps avoid. Otherwise we have a communal tendency to kick the can down the road until the problem becomes insurmountable.
> I suspect it’s not so much a matter of being poor, but allowing the possibility of being poor.
> If you do not have the freedom to fail, then you also have less opportunity to succeed.
Interesting hypothesis. I have a counter-hypothesis: it is not good if people can die due to poor choices. It's not good if they can get so poor they can't escape and improve their lives. It's not good if wealth is concentrated, because this leads to worse quality of life for most people. On the contrary: you have to give people an opportunity to improve if you want them to improve, and the only way to do this is to support them so they aren't destined to stay poor.
All of these observations seem to be both obvious and historically grounded. Do you have any counter-arguments beyond your initial hypothesis?
> So, what happens when social security fails and nobody had retirement income? That’s the kind of problem that small scale poverty helps avoid. Otherwise we have a communal tendency to kick the can down the road until the problem becomes insurmountable.
Then why are there so many more poor people in the US compared to the EU? Shouldn't the US need a smaller amount of poverty for their system to function well? Why does reality not seem to line up with your hypothesis?
I'm sure it's simply because almost everyone lives off unreported, cash income. Let's be honest: 60K per year is poverty, it's picking between living in a place without roaches vs eating out in a crappy place once per week. UK is not a poor country.
I know plenty of people earning around a median wage but no one who actually lives on that little. When you get median wage, or two, or three, you still need someone else to pay your bills.
My employees get 2-4x median wages and they do NOT live on that money alone (almost all of them moonlight elsewhere), and they are almost all struggling.
I am far in top 1% and when i saw what is the asking rent now i said to myself - "wow if i had to move now, that'll be a predicament". Ask any landlord if they are getting paid through the bank. Many won't even accept bank payment. They are paid in cash - and that cash hasn't been in the bank since many circulation loops ago. People are not poor. They are buying everything like crazy, economy is running so hot it can blow up any moment. They just don't report the money they make.
I can't imagine the cognitive dissonance required to call 60K/year poverty. That's a decent salary where I live, and a comfortable income in most parts of the world.
You need to take a trip up north and/or to coastal UK towns if you think this is the reality. 60k a year would be a well paying job up here. At my previous job, 60k is what the Technical Development Manager was on, who was in charge of multiple development teams. Senior devs were typically on 40k - 55k, mid level devs on 28k-35k and junior devs 22k-28k. And this was an international company (UK mainly but recently opened in the US) which was raking in over a billion in revenue. The UK is a very unequal place.
Also, I live in the US not the UK, but I'd question whether most people in the median income range and certainly as you rise materially above that not only have significant non-salary money coming in but it's of a nature that isn't reported.
Using the the top 10 percent of incomes is meaningless….because the divide here is astronomical.
It is really the the top 1 percent of earners (and honestly a fraction of that) that hold all the wealth. The ultra elite wealthy like to hide in groups like the top ten percent to avoid being signaled out for just how much obscene wealth they control.
The way wealth is controlled, printed, shifted by policies and large banking institutions we are living in almost a modern feudal like system.