American Wealth, Sliced Up

https://kottke.org/26/05/american-wealth-sliced-up

31•amai•2h ago

Comments

JCTheDenthog•1h ago

I'd love the idea of a more equal share of wealth in America. Unfortunately most of the proposed solutions tend to be of the "make everyone equally miserable" sort, and usually come from the sorts of people that imagine themselves as the commissars and cadres of the new regime in such a situation.

Europe has tried to limit to wealth of the wealthiest, and in the process seems to have utterly kneecapped their own economies and development. The poorest US states are wealthier (even when adjusting for PPP) than all but the wealthiest European nations.

actionfromafar•59m ago

The poorest US states are wealthier through redistribution of wealth to them from other states.

JCTheDenthog•54m ago

Mississippians average $43,000 of disposable income. Net federal money to Mississippi is roughly $9,000 per capita. Even if we assume that 100% of that $9,000 is welfare payments to the poorest, that still puts Mississippi roughly equal to Germany in terms of disposable income.

Epa095•41m ago

And still Mississipi has a child mortality rate og 9.65 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to Germanys 3.4. Life expectancy is 72.6 vs 81.7 (!!)

Looking at income per person really misses some important factors of a societies real riches.

hnav•52m ago

You're looking at GDP when comparing Missouri to European nations. Bulgaria has higher life expectancy than half this country.

JCTheDenthog•48m ago

The OP is about wealth, not life expectancy.

hnav•38m ago

The standard of life you get is one you can afford. GDP PPI does a better job of capturing this than GDP, but better yet look at how long people live. The best raw GDP is gotten when you drive your working class until they collapse and die and thus is a shitty metric for measuring quality of life unless that means the ability to acquire globally manufactured trinkets to you.

Epa095•37m ago

I guess this is the difference between people existing for the betterment of the economy vs the economy existing for the betterment of people.

tossandthrow•31m ago

If you move health care out of the US economy (as it largely is in the EU), you are at quite similar gdp.

JCTheDenthog•1m ago

Nope, even adjusting for health care costs the average American is still roughly 20-40% richer than the average European. This may come as a shock to you, but roughly 20% of Americans are on Medicaid, our state-sponsored healthcare insurance. America does actually provide healthcare for its poorest citizens.

MaxHoppersGhost•51m ago

I wish we’d focus more on living standards than wealth as I think that’s what really matters. “How can we lift up the people with low living standards in the US?” should be the question rather than “How can we keep people from becoming ultra rich?” which I think is what happened in Europe. The only reason wealth should be checked is because of undue influence on politics/power. Otherwise I don’t care if there are 1,000 trillionaires as long as as many Americans as possible have a good quality of life. I think for many the obsession with redistributing wealth comes from a deep seated jealousy.

Epa095•27m ago

So, money is likes votes into the economy, and it decides what the economy produces. When a rich man decides that a house should be built for his two dogs, and that another human should spend their time taking care of those dogs, he can use his money to influence the economy to produce as he wants. The labour does not pop into existence from the void, similar with the materials for the house. It is a redirection of the economy to produce what he wants.

Money is not like mana, it does not conjure things into existence, it moves (through the invisible hand) the economy to produce what the owner desires.

Now, this does absolutely not mean that the economy is zero sum (over time). There are of course something the economy can do which will be productive and produce more goods, and there can be bad decisions. Wealth can absolutely be created by actually value creation, but also by a lot of parasitic processes(and inheritance). And the owner of money gets to controll what the economy does, you don't (barely).

A large concentration of wealth will mean that the economy at large will to a larger degree be used to produce what really rich people wants, instead of producing things the middle class wants.

Epa095•13m ago

Regarding your last sentence about the jealousy, I have been thinking about this quite a bit for myself, if it is actually jealousy. And I have come to the following realisation:

I would like 20$ million. It would let me live the life I want (with extra), and take care of the people I love. I would be able to spend my time doing only things I like. I am envious of people having this kind of wealth. I don't really want more, and I am not more envious of someone having 100 of millions of dollars. This you must just belive me on, but I truly don't see what I would do with more than 20$ million.

But they, the ones with hundreds of millions, are the ones I want to tax. Because I am afraid of them, afraid of the power that comes with the wealth. And if it was envy I would have wanted to tax everyone I envied, also the ones with 10-20$ million. But I am fine with them having their wealth, cause they don't scare me.

asjldkfin•1h ago

Can somebody explain how this graph makes sense?

It seems to imply the top 2 people own 30% of the wealth, which is not what the data states.

hatthew•53m ago

Yeah the graph is more for vibes than an actual analogy. The yellow slice represents the top 1%, purple 90-99%, green 50-90%, and red bottom 50%. It would make a bit more sense if those slices were labeled "1 person", "9 people", "40 people", and "50 people" respectively.

cactacea•52m ago

compare to https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

rest of america == bottom 50%

hedge funders, fascist VCs, etc == 50-90%

walton children == 90-99%

elon bezos == 99.9%

pjscott•46m ago

Even then, the numbers don't even remotely work out. Consider this "Elon Bezos" person; the combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is about $1.3 trillion or so, and the "Top 0.1%" category in the Fed's data has a net worth of about $25 trillion. This is not a small difference.

LVB•51m ago

I want to see the breakdown of fascist vs. non-fascist VCs, too!

dayyan•59m ago

The acid test of intelligence is if one believes in a zero sum economy or not.

warkdarrior•56m ago

The economy is not zero sum, so new wealth is being created. But that does not say anything about who receives that new wealth.

tossandthrow•55m ago

And then there are people who use this argument against redistribution and as a pro inequality argument.

The pie gets bigger in more equal societies.

That is the real acid test.

throwawayqqq11•12m ago

The pie gets bigger as long there is room for economic growth, which points to our finite planet and a zero-sum economy after all. When the non-zero wealth creation is only in the form of eg. circular investment, as we see it today, i would dismiss it as a detached numbers game.

marginalia_nu•51m ago

I don't think there's a real contradiction between the propositions:

1. The economy is not a zero-sum game.

2. The new gilded age concentrates wealth in a way that is harmful to free enterprise, detrimental to the economy, and bad for the world.

anon291•47m ago

In what way is any of this wealth distribution harmful to free enterprise? The things actually harmful to free enterprise are not even on this chart.

edawg88•56m ago

I think the wealth should be age adjusted for inflation. Older people have had much more compounding than younger folds, much more time to save and earn, etc. Just doing it by raw percentages is a bit too raw.

myroon5•54m ago

That graph literally just has fake labels. In reality, millionaires collectively have more than an order of magnitude more wealth than billionaires: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4zjnFxGWYkEF4nqMi/...

hatthew•51m ago

The data on the graph is real, but the labels are made up for vibes.

jmpman•53m ago

The laffer curve was used to justify lower taxes in order to maximize government revenues. When you look at an individual, you can imagine that each individual would have an optimal laffer curve. Too high of a tax rate, and people aren't incentivized to work for one more dollar. However, we never talk about the laffer curve for dead people. I'd say that it could be about as high as you want to make it, and they're not going to work any more or less for an additional dollar. And their children who inherit that wealth, also.. higher laffer curve. Somehow Republicans don't bring that up when they advocate lower taxes on the rich.

JCTheDenthog•50m ago

>However, we never talk about the laffer curve for dead people. I'd say that it could be about as high as you want to make it, and they're not going to work any more or less for an additional dollar.

Can you really not imagine that what happens to their wealth after they die, wealth they were presumably accumulating at least in part for their children, would have zero effect on how much they work before they die? Honestly, your argument here comes across as utterly unserious.

pyrophane•49m ago

A handful of super-rich families got together in the 90s, hired some people to put together a campaign to re-label the estate tax as the death tax and convince everyone it was causing families to lose their small farms, and we haven’t talked seriously about it since.

JCTheDenthog•44m ago

Larger scale family farms that would go over the estate tax minimums make up around 4% of all farms in the US, from what I can find. Disrupting about 4% of farms upon the death of the farmer does in fact seem like a bad idea to me. But thst didn't stop Stalin from liquidating the kulaks.

Blackstrat•51m ago

Generally, income distribution is a solved problem. The issue is that too many people aren't willing to take the steps necessary to get the income they seek. They'd rather scream about the minimum wage, the ultra-rich, the evil white men, etc. Redistribution schemes do not work. Bottom line, stay in school, get a functional education, stay off drugs, moderate alcohol intake, and don't have kids early, particularly when you aren't married. Yes, I'm aware that there are those people for whom such steps are insurmountable. That's where community organization come into play, e.g., churches, NGOs. It isn't the government's role to ensure equal outcomes. That's called communism. And it fails everywhere it's tried.

Blackstrat•45m ago

I love the reaction that I see when people are told they are responsible for their own outcomes and it takes work. Getting down voted for such comments is hilarious.

hnav•42m ago

On that note why are the ultra-rich so dead-set on avoiding estate taxation? Shouldn't their children be responsible for growing their own billions when their inheritance takes a 50% haircut?

hnav•44m ago

You don't have to wheel out the boogeyman of communism. The distribution of wealth in this country allows a person to have 1 MILLION TIMES the spending power of somebody who drives a bus, puts out fires or stitches up wounds. Crucially, the distribution is only getting worse.

I find the comment on the role of the government not being ensuring equality of outcomes especially laughable, because it is precisely that government that's been subverted to make the distribution more skewed. I guess the ruling class disagrees with you?

rmah•47m ago

While mildly humorous, I don't understand why people on HN are voting this up. The pie chart is misleading at best.

elevation•46m ago

If you liquidate Elon or Bezos' wealth and distribute it to every US citizen, you're looking at a one time payment of $1-2K per US citizen, and that's only if the value of the assents holds as you attempt to liquidate everything. If you sell it off slowly, you'll get more, but a few years of payments of $50/mo from the Bezos estate is hardly a UBI utopia.

I can do far better for myself than that if I'm simply allowed to work overtime, and especially if I'm not criminalized for savings that I invest.

> n, and that's only if the value of the assents holds as you attempt to liquidate everything. If you sell it off slowly, you'll get more, but $50/mo from the Bezos estate is hardly a UBI utopia.

tossandthrow•43m ago

What comments like this does not realize is that moving 1-2k usd into the hands of the people is democratizing the expenditure.

Suddenly musk, bezos and friends do not decide what people work on - people do.

hnav•28m ago

Another thing that gets lost is that there are a few layers between Jeff and Elon and the rank-and-file. If everyone paid their fair share it'd be a lot less likely that every world-class city has 10% of its real estate locked up in pied-a-terres. The ability to dodge taxes really kicks in at mid 8 figures, not billions.

hnav•32m ago

You realize that Elon and Bezos are stealing from you when you invest and get taxed at 50% marginal, right? They certainly don't pay anywhere near that. The trick they play on you is by lumping you in with them in spirit (hard working go-getters) whereas by actual buying power you're closer to the homeless guy panhandling on the street.

diziet•41m ago

Well, the labels are fundamentally misleading: According to the author's data, "40 people get 0.75 slices each", whereas that 30 slice pie is labeled as "Hedge funders, fascist VCs, and cosmetic surgeons". Even if you take a charitable view to bundle every possible related occupation, I can hardly understand how labeling 40% of the US population as "Hedge funders, fascist VCs, and cosmetic surgeons" is accurate.

The US has a very progressive taxation system: https://taxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/FedData...

For working and middle class households, the US tax burden is usually lower than in most European states, especially once payroll/social-insurance taxes and VAT are included. The US federal tax system is also very progressive by OECD standards, so upper-income households carry a larger share of federal taxes while the lower/middle bear less of the explicit tax load

Of course, wealth is not exactly income, etc

jauntywundrkind•1m ago

Meanwhile The Economist is inviting Arthur Laffer to publish pieces praising Reaganomics / trickle down. https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/06/02/reaganomi...

Just wild how much the media has become a system for self-congratulations for the global elite barbarian class.

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