Both are important. A lot of poverty is directly caused by having a class of rich people who seek to siphon away as many resources as they can. A society with only poor people would probably be a more cooperative one, which would help in raising the average standard of living.
For instance, shelter being expensive implies either that it's fundamentally difficult to construct shelter (which is not the case, as seen in every slum and homeless camp everywhere) or the existence of rich landlords.
This is a nice start to develop a language to discuss wealth.
99 vs 1%, normal vs millionaires vs billionaires, lower vs upper vs middle class, investor vs working class are some of the language I’ve seen used.
All of them are extremely inadequate and allow the |^7-11 folks to get away with a lot that they shouldn’t by scaring the folks at |^4-6 that it would apply to them.
> Generally, someone’s wealth level can be inferred from their net worth.
> But also, “assets minus liabilities” offers some large shadows to hide behind.
> So a better quantity to measure would be: the amount of money someone could bring to bear on a problem if they had to. If someone they loved fell deathly ill, but the treatment would cost some large amount of money, how much could they pull together in a month or two? How much could they borrow, and from whom, and on what terms?
The following breakdowns are largely just people's net worth (assets minus liabilities) with the credit they can tap because of their assets.
Not sure I entirely understand the point. Yeah, people with assets are generally more credit-worthy and can tap lines of credit.
> ‘“Net worth” is an unfortunate term, because a human’s “worth” is obviously more than just their wealth.’
I grew up in a fairly egalitarian 1980s Nordic society and English is my third language.
I remember the first time I heard “worth” used in this American idiom:
“Person X is worth $Y”
It was shocking; almost like the most forbidden thing you could say, a glimpse of eugenics. If a person’s worth is measured in dollars, what does that say about the worth of underpaid women and minorities and children with development challenges…?
In the decades since, Silicon Valley has moved so far right that this barely registers anymore.
Too granular, there are 4 levels of wealth: the destitute, those who have to work, those who have enough assets to not work, and finally the elite who influence the rules of society.
The "↑11" bucket -- which Saul labeled as "Megacorps ($300b-$3t)" -- now contains at least one individual human. How far we've come (or fallen?) in just a year.
One thing that previous societies definitely got right is to talk about envy negatively. Everything these days is about envy. It’s not enough for one’s life to improve. It has to improve relative to others or people get upset.
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is now couched in socialist rhetoric about inequality. We can tell this is the case because when wage compression occurs, people get upset at “inflation” and “it’s so expensive now”.
The bottom percentiles saw unprecedented growth in recent years relative to the middle. Rather than celebrate, people got upset because things got expensive. When poor labor gets paid more, they get more expensive. That’s how it works.
Interesting. I guess I would be a 5, but live like a 2, as it’s less stressful that way.
I have friends who are 6’s and acquaintances who are 7’s and their manner of thinking and goals in life baffle me. I simply cannot relate to them at all.
"Hard drugs are plentiful at this level" appears to be something the author invented out of thin air. Cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and "hard drugs" all cost money and therefore the rates of abuse of these things are positively correlated with income, which should not surprise you.
These things would be positively correlated with income only to some bare minimum level. Most drugs seem to be relatively cheap, so it doesn't strike me as odd that someone with an utterly miserable life would be more likely to use their meager savings towards substance abuse to try and temporarily make themselves feel better.
Traditionally when talking about money as it relates to social class, people refer to an income bracket
I think this article is worth the read for the interesting data it highlights with the arbitrary framework, but it's hard to ignore the elephant in the room: the author's "traditional" experience here excludes a huge part of the economic thought of the last 200 years.
I know this isn't exactly a forum predisposed to Marx, but I would encourage even the most fervent anti-communists to take some time to appreciate his economic work on a scientific level. Wealth is absolutely more important than income when analyzing society, because a certain amount of wealth makes one a "capitalist" (in a literal sense, not an ideological one). Capitalists live a life of luxury without working, and they are explicitly+intentionally tasked with the lions share of social responsibility (or, more pejoratively, social power).
TL;DR: You don't need to be a Marxist to appreciate the utility of labor-based class analysis in our society! Given that the traditional SV goal is to become a capitalist as quickly as possible ("FIRE"), we'd do better to discuss this stuff more frequently...
I don't get the point of these types of "5 levels of X"...
Like yes you can take any continuous variable and draw as many lines in the sand as you'd like (5 levels of tallness, or even 27 levels of tallness, or whatever) and actually say nothing while apparently sound like you're saying something??
Not sure I see the point of these breakdowns. It reads as if written for a school-age child.
In fact kids probably know intuitively exactly where they fall on this scale without having to read a blog, unless their parents are ultra-wealthy but hide it from them really well.
Also putting someone with 300k vs 3 million in the same "bracket" is wild.
I think writing an article that starts by "We need to have meaningful discussions about structural class differences, and segmenting the population based on wealth is an obvious starting point" and then not even mention Marx once is strange. This article does not give sufficient motivation for the construction of its complex 14-layers scale: why is it needed and how is it more useful to understand power dynamics in our society than the traditional capital vs labor distinction?
Why the weird notation? Apart from very high net worth individuals, the metric seems pointless, navel gazing at best.
Aside from that, why not just use log10(<individual's wealth>/<average wealth>) as a function of a particular market like EU, USA, Greenland, whatever. That way the metric is agnostic to inflation and differences in currency value.
I think in my ideal society it would be possible to move up a level by hard work alone (and, conversely, laziness would cause one to move down a level). Unfortunately it seems to me almost everyone stays at the level they were born at and changes happen only rarely due to good/bad luck.
31 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] threadInequality is a problem parroted by middle classes mostly due to envy. It has nothing to do with improving lives of the destitute.
For instance, shelter being expensive implies either that it's fundamentally difficult to construct shelter (which is not the case, as seen in every slum and homeless camp everywhere) or the existence of rich landlords.
99 vs 1%, normal vs millionaires vs billionaires, lower vs upper vs middle class, investor vs working class are some of the language I’ve seen used.
All of them are extremely inadequate and allow the |^7-11 folks to get away with a lot that they shouldn’t by scaring the folks at |^4-6 that it would apply to them.
> But also, “assets minus liabilities” offers some large shadows to hide behind.
> So a better quantity to measure would be: the amount of money someone could bring to bear on a problem if they had to. If someone they loved fell deathly ill, but the treatment would cost some large amount of money, how much could they pull together in a month or two? How much could they borrow, and from whom, and on what terms?
The following breakdowns are largely just people's net worth (assets minus liabilities) with the credit they can tap because of their assets.
Not sure I entirely understand the point. Yeah, people with assets are generally more credit-worthy and can tap lines of credit.
I grew up in a fairly egalitarian 1980s Nordic society and English is my third language.
I remember the first time I heard “worth” used in this American idiom:
“Person X is worth $Y”
It was shocking; almost like the most forbidden thing you could say, a glimpse of eugenics. If a person’s worth is measured in dollars, what does that say about the worth of underpaid women and minorities and children with development challenges…?
In the decades since, Silicon Valley has moved so far right that this barely registers anymore.
> About 16 million people (↑7) are designated as HNWI.
What does the ↑7 means? Later he starts using it in a context that I don't understand (e.g. > About 250,000 people (↑5.5))
https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/605075/are-you-ri...
“Keeping up with the Joneses” is now couched in socialist rhetoric about inequality. We can tell this is the case because when wage compression occurs, people get upset at “inflation” and “it’s so expensive now”.
The bottom percentiles saw unprecedented growth in recent years relative to the middle. Rather than celebrate, people got upset because things got expensive. When poor labor gets paid more, they get more expensive. That’s how it works.
I have friends who are 6’s and acquaintances who are 7’s and their manner of thinking and goals in life baffle me. I simply cannot relate to them at all.
I know this isn't exactly a forum predisposed to Marx, but I would encourage even the most fervent anti-communists to take some time to appreciate his economic work on a scientific level. Wealth is absolutely more important than income when analyzing society, because a certain amount of wealth makes one a "capitalist" (in a literal sense, not an ideological one). Capitalists live a life of luxury without working, and they are explicitly+intentionally tasked with the lions share of social responsibility (or, more pejoratively, social power).
TL;DR: You don't need to be a Marxist to appreciate the utility of labor-based class analysis in our society! Given that the traditional SV goal is to become a capitalist as quickly as possible ("FIRE"), we'd do better to discuss this stuff more frequently...
Like yes you can take any continuous variable and draw as many lines in the sand as you'd like (5 levels of tallness, or even 27 levels of tallness, or whatever) and actually say nothing while apparently sound like you're saying something??
In fact kids probably know intuitively exactly where they fall on this scale without having to read a blog, unless their parents are ultra-wealthy but hide it from them really well.
Also putting someone with 300k vs 3 million in the same "bracket" is wild.
"A person with lower ↑6 wealth is a “high-net-worth individual” (HNWI, $1m)"
"About 16 million people (↑7) are designated as HNWI."
Aside from that, why not just use log10(<individual's wealth>/<average wealth>) as a function of a particular market like EU, USA, Greenland, whatever. That way the metric is agnostic to inflation and differences in currency value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
Somebody with $300k has a relatively different life than somebody with $3m, no?