Is This a Problem?
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October 1, 2012 at 8:36pm
My liberal friends on Facebook believe that it is. My feeling is that, as a static data point, it doesn't mean much. More interesting would be to know the trend. It's a political Rorschach test, of course. The liberal view is that things used to be more balanced and now have become skewed. I can't help but think with the rise of home ownership, the opposite must be true. Does anyone know?
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Comments:
Oct '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
I'm surprised. Liberals usually avoid offending the top 20% income bracket at all costs; it's why they scapegoat the top 1%. Myself, I think economic inequality is a symptom of other problems; I'm in Charles Murray's moral-breakdown-causes-class-stagnation camp.
By the way, no one really knows what the distribution of income is today, because the IRS releases hard data with a two-year lag. The trend seems to be down, not up, but of course liberals never mention this; they still believe inequality is "exploding."
Jun '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
I agree with John Murdoch in #8. I was at a plating company not too long ago that looked like one guy was In Charge. If he's a C-Corp or an LLC, then maybe his records show he's worth $10 million. But $9 million could easily be in land, a BIG building, a lot of large, fancy machinery, and beaucoup raw zinc, chrome and platinum.
Aug '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
The graph does not tell us the annual income for each quintile. Pretty sneaky.
The designers of the graph want you to assume that you couldn't possibly be one of the "lucky ones".
Imagine that the majority of actual voters looking at that graph were to discover that they just happened to be a member of the fourth (or even the fifth!) quintile?
That might change how they react to the graph.
Apr '12
Re: Is This a Problem?
Yes! And if we knew his history, past and present, he has been working hard all his life, and is still putting in a long day, every day of the week. He is also perhaps stressed out because he has just lost a huge client, or a valuable employee, or the market is changing and will he be out of business, and his wife has cancer and who is going to look after his children.
I taught my children that Robin(g) Hood was a criminal, much to the consternation of the mothers of their little friends. :-)
Aug '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
Well, I protest the fact that there are so many more pine trees in Canada than in Missouri . Also that we don't have any koala bears in Missouri .
The distribution of that flora and fauna is UNFAIR .
Now what are they gonna do about that !
Jul '11
Re: Is This a Problem?
The people who think the middle bar is "desired" need remedial math.
If the Amount & % are equal, then every one is the same - i.e there is no "top" or "bottom" i.e. a socialist society.
Perhaps pictures of starvation in North Korea should go with the graphs.
Edited on October 1, 2012 at 9:56pmJul '11
Re: Is This a Problem?
I'd be interested to know how the real wealth of all these quintiles have changed over time. My guess is that every one was growing until the recession hit, and since then we've gone down.
Also, is debt included in this? If so, college debt will definitely take a big piece out of the lower quintile. Over $1 trillion in student loan debt is 2% of the total U.S. wealth, and most of it is in the lowest quintile which, by my eyes, possesses 1% of total wealth. That's a recipe for a small piece of any pie.
-E
May '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
The question is who created the wealth not how is it distributed. I have no problem with wealth disparity if that wealth is created. Wealth creation is a real contribution to the capital stock and efficiency that results in a rising standard of living for all.
The problem is complaints about "wealth distribution inequality" lead to redistributionist policy that are in reality a license to rent seek by those with access to political power.
Jul '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
Ugh. Amounts don't matter, unless you're driven entirely by envy. Quality of life in absolute terms is what matters.
A lot of this is probably due to people not comprehending the scale of the economy. Would you rather have 20% of $1,000, or 1% of $1,000,000?
May '12
Re: Is This a Problem?
It's not Fair!
BTW, had I led with this photo, would that have been Rascist?
Jun '11
Re: Is This a Problem?
To repeat Don Tillman's point a little less cleverly: the "ideal" distribution is preposterous. If being in the top quintile gets you only 50% above the average, and the bottom quintile gets you half of the average, not a lot of incentive to hustle.
So many other misleading aspects, too. There is no upper limit to the top 20%'s wealth, but the bottom is effectively limited to zero. That automatically makes it look quite lopsided. Many of those zero asset households are young and will accumulate wealth in the next forty years. Many others are supported by taxpayers at an average cost of $50,000 per year. Many others are recent low-income immigrants (legal or not) whose zero-asset status was imported, shall we say, rather than created in this country.
The worst thing about the chart is the suggestion that this is a problem to be solved, yet what "solution" is not worse than the problem ?
Feb '11
Re: Is This a Problem?
People here seem to be confused about wealth and income. They aren't the same thing.
Sep '12
Re: Is This a Problem?
I wonder about the methodology in this poll. It seems to me the results for the middle section may be skewed toward those with a certain mindset, because those of another mindset might not respond at all. If I were asked what the "ideal distribution of wealth" was, my response would be something along the lines of "why the [bad word] should I care?", and then I would likely hang up. My guess is they would not include that response in their results.
May '12
Re: Is This a Problem?
But seriously, that Chart makes as much sense to me as the Hockey Stick graph. There are Lies, Damned Lies, and there are Statistics. And if you want to tell a Goebbels-Class Whopper, make a Chart or Graph.
Nov '11
Re: Is This a Problem?
Oh man, this chart says other people have more wealth than me. They're screwing me!
Its really not fair. I think, therefore, that makes it okay to take their wealth for myself.
Oct '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
Jojo:
The worst thing about the chart is the suggestion that this is a problem to be solved, yet what "solution" is not worse than the problem ? · 2 minutes ago
Well, there are certainly libertarian solutions, like school choice, repealing occupational licensing laws, local zoning regulations, regulatory consolidation to cut back on the opportunity for businesses to capture regulators (made all the more worse by the sheer number of regulatory bureaucracies we have in this country), etc.
There's also social conservative ideas, like strengthening marriage and monogamy norms in low-income communities (by "strengthening," I don't mean "have Karl Rove scapegoat homosexuals"), encouraging local elites to "preach" their values to their low-income constituents, etc.
All of these would have the effect of reducing economic inequality, not by redistributing wealth from makers to takers, but by spreading around human and social capital and social best practices. And unlike economic redistribution, this approach will increase social equality as well as economic equality, and ultimately I think social equality matters much more than economic equality (I'm with Mickey Kaus on this one; redistribution creates social exclusion, and I really, really hate social exclusion).
Apr '12
Re: Is This a Problem?
R. Craigen:
Now let us do the same thingwith taxes! Won't your liberal friends have fun deciding whether it's a good or a bad thing that a majority of Americans regard the top 1% earners as not paying their "fair share" of taxes, while by any sane person's judgement they are paying far more than any reasonable share, while 47% don't have any skin in the game at all.
While that's by income instead of property, it's a very useful point. It also gets you called a mathematical illiterate that doesn't realize 30% of the taxes on 10% (example only, here are real numbers) of income is clearly unfairly low, and then blocked. Insults about sexuality, activity, appearance and anything else they think might hurt is extra.
Apr '12
Re: Is This a Problem?
It comes to mind that my household has far more "wealth" than physical possessions would suggest, even if you ignore debt; we've got two young, healthy future workers, and my husband and I are still fairly young and healthy, and we've got the easy potential for several more young, healthy workers with entire lifetimes of potential.
Property has value from potential, why wouldn't people? If future work that I can do has value, why would that of my children- who are also in the household-- not have value?
Bet that would really mess things up!
Aug '10
Re: Is This a Problem?
Mr.Craigen nailed it:
But with regards to wealth, the distribution (the word being used in a statistical sense) shown in the graph is quite natural, and occurs wherever you look: Mary Kay saleswomen, Honda dealers, even plumbers. It's called the Pareto Principle: in just about any endeavor, 20% of the people are responsible for 80% of the results.
Mar '11
Re: Is This a Problem?
Thank you. The reason why liberals say "distribution" is that they think of wealth as a fixed resource that should be allotted by a higher authority on an as-needed basis, the same way that a charity would allot donated food to a disaster area. And they think this way because they're essentially Marxists at heart. Earned? Created? Nonsense, they say. Wealth is a resource that is stolen from the common people and hoarded by oligarchs. These people essentially have a central-planning mindset.