See figure 2.

The issue is that income/wealth compounds over time. If people in the bottom 40% have very little to invest, they have nothing that compounds. They dont even have an opportunity to risk anything, or make a better decision.

The prices of the essentials are largely out of any individual's control. So any lack of ability to save / invest beyond spending on those is also out of their control. It's a vicious cycle, where excess wealth compounds, and income needed to exist dries up.

Also the rich often see a larger return to their investments than poor people, so having wealth seems to aide in your ability to make more money. Exactly the sort of thing that you implied was unjust.

And your other points about mobility I agree with and are addressed in notes on the site.

> "does (or how much does) it matter if any specific percentile group is getting disproportionally richer, given all (or a vast majority of) groups are?"

The page says that at least 50% of all people are not, so this seems like a very moot question until such a time as that changes.

And if it ever does change, we can then move on to the issue that "fairness" only exists to the extent that one is willing to acknowledge that having money fundamentally and inherently leads to having more money due to the nature of compounding growth, and the more money you have the more money you get by no real action at all.

You talk about "earned", but how exactly have I "earned" the compounding growth on my holdings? I certainly don't work for it. It just flows in for free as the world population continues to grow and produce. I can do literally nothing at all but drink margaritas on the beach and my assets will grow more per year than an average person ever makes by labor. Would you say that I "earn" it? I call it "getting" not "earning". There's nothing fair about it.

I like your post a lot, in that you're describing how this doesn't say anything about anyone's chances really. However...

> but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned

How would they abuse their democratic powers? It's their decision to vote either way. So who says that's unjust? Certainly it's not abusing their democratic powers.

Abusing of power happens on the other end of the spectrum, especially in the US thanks to citizens united.... Surely all those super PAC dollars don't buy any influence... As a result, the voice of a single rich person might be stronger than a whole quintile of the population. So chances are that they are unjustly given things that aren't theirs (i.e. advantageous contracts, laws that help them etcetera).

Wealth inequality is mainly a statistical phenomena.

If you start a perfectly fair society where everyone has exactly the same amount of money and you play a game were people interact and with equal random chance (i.e. each exchange you get a 50/50 chance of earning 1 buck or losing one), after a few exchanges you get a Boltzmann-Gibbs (exponential) distribution.

If each agent wealth chance of increasing depends on what they already have, you get a pareto distribution.

It's extremely hard to avoid at large scale.

>A group's lack of movement is not unjust if their groups actions do justify a movement upward.

I assume you mean "do not justify" and the bottom line is that this type of thinking is fundamentally erroneous.

We agree to live in a society of this construction not so everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps (asinine conception that misunderstands structural vs individual agency) but because it is of collective benefit.

If it it not of collective benefit, the social agreement needs to be renegotiated.

There's no chance everyone will agree to live in an arrangement where a minority of the population accrues all of the benefit because they go out of their way to execute financial scams, but I'm willing to litigate that publicly, which we're doing here.

Past a point of wealth, it seems a lot easier to increase wealth through things of no intrinsic value to society.

If I have enough money, I can buy a lot of businesses (or be in a controlling position) and run them poorly (read: efficently) and as wealth concentrates the capital for a new entrant to compete becomes scarcer and regulation on new competition mysteriously materializes, and without any new competition I can raise prices and no one can really do anything.

And now I have more money to do this more times in more places, and wealth is more concentrated, and legislation just seems to go my way more and so on.

That vague playbook is being applied to just about everything today.

Spirit Airlines went through two bankruptcies, and the people who lead the first one were liquidating it while it was still running to pay themselves back for the first one, and turning debt they had forfeited for equity back into debt to increase how much they'd take out of the remains.

I mean you can't even escape that playbook in childrens sports! That playbook is being run into making children sports league a profit squeezing cartel as we speak.

It's just such a simple playbook that if we really go all in on the idea that anything that's technically legal to make money will be allowed, then having more money and basic "high agency" mindset will lead to making money in increasingly perverse ways.

To me the end game seems to be a race between authoritarianism (will these high-agency wealthy types just be able to keep the poorer class under lock and key with TikTok feeds to placate) and collapse (maybe they don't get the poor under deep enough control before the poor realize they've been given a deal that justifies trying to raze it all and start again)(edit: or maybe better framing, they realize they collectively have no meaningful part in the wealth and raze it)

The global billionaire class now numbers roughly 3,500 people and collectively controls around $15–20 trillion in wealth. That's about the annual GDP of China.

That's about twice as much as the lower 50% of the population (2% of the world's wealth)... a class consisting of 4 billion people.

Why do people pretend "right actions" has anything to do with it. "Right actions" aren't even possible at that scale of difference. How does "earning" even make sense at these proportions? you think 3500 people are doing that much more than 4 billion others?

There is a per person and per household toggle. That is where the lower numbers are coming from. I'll try and make that more clear.

>Made by Patrick Glenn by way of Claude and ChatGPT. Code under the MIT License; text and charts under CC BY 4.0.

fixed.

I don’t think that many people have read Piketty given how dense his work is. I’m glad I share my native language with him which makes it a bit easier to understand some of his points, but his writing is really difficult to grasp IMHO

The Disney World visitors are a specific group of people. The vast majority of them do not go there every week, nor every month. So the behavior you observe in there is not representative of the routine behavior of those people.

In other words, yes, they may pay 5x the price for a meal in an amusement park that they visit once a year. That does not mean they are willing to pay anything close to that for a meal every week or every day.

It's my observation over time that there has been a sharp increase in the what people would call the "bare minimum" life. I think it's a combination of credit, a loss of stoicism, and social media pushing a distortion of reality.

This is just trickle down economics, which has led to great wealth inequality while the middle and lower class wages have stagnated as inflation has gone up. What really helps is strong social safety nets and programs that help struggling people. The Nordic model leads to better societal outcomes.

This is just trickle down economics, which has led to great wealth inequality while the middle and lower class wages have stagnated as inflation has gone up and more people have to rent instead of owning their own porpoerty. What really helps is strong social safety nets and programs that help struggling people. The Nordic model leads to better societal outcomes.

Flag and move on

good point. taxes and welfare should probably be on by default. ill change that.

I just thought it was a better illustration, easier for the average person to comprehend without those.

I didnt mean to do any advocating. Just provided the info because I wanted to see how it'd affect things.

More than propagandistic, it calls into question whether they are actually trying to solve a problem at all. The US has considerable support for low income families. That's a good thing, if you don't want to even see whether it works, what's your goal?