Yes. And surprisingly, I also remember my rebuttal, which you didn’t bother to mention, AND I remember that you got your butt thoroughly handed to you in that thread.
So other people don’t have to remember, here’s what I said in rebuttal to you:
For anyone who wants to follow it all in context, here’s the entire thread in question. The real fun begins on page 2.
Oh and Dick, since you brought up that old thread, perhaps you’d like to comment on this post, which you ignored.
It cites the National Bureau of Economic Research, which has a compelling argument that a prime cause of rising income inequality is purely do to the difference in living costs between high income people and low income people. For example, some of the highest-income people live in Manhattan, where the living costs are also the highest.
Here’s the abstract:
So… the increase in income inequality may only be 1/10 as great as the raw income numbers show when measured against real wages, because it turns out that the CPI has increased faster in the places where the higher income people live. That kind of sheds a whole new light on the whole income inequality thing, doesn’t it?
In addition, it also helps explain why the share of income of the top 1% has increased, while the share of wealth of the top 1% has actually gone down. In addition, when the CPI is different for the rich than for the poor in a country with a progressive tax system, the rich will see an increasing tax burden year over year measured against real wages.
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
xtisme, did you miss my questions in post #102? Answer if you would, please:
[/QUOTE]
Sorry…yes, I missed it. Trying to post at work on a phone sometimes makes it hard to follow all the posts or reply to questions.
Yes, I think the claim that wealth has been redistributed upwards is incorrect. In order for wealth to be redistributed upward, IMHO, that necessitates taking it directly from the lower and middle class and giving it to the wealthy. I don’t believe this has happened. Of course, it’s a semantic exercise that hinges on one’s definition of what redistribution of wealth means.
As for what I presume is your broader question, do I think that the wealthy retaining more of their wealth is justified, I’d have to say that, with some qualifications my own answer would tend to be ‘yes’. I think that having and keeping capital in the hands of those who earn it will, over all, be more beneficial to society as a whole than soaking those same wealthy so that the government can decide what is the best thing to do. YMMV of course.
And the productivity of workers has risen steadily over that same period of time. Today’s CEO’s of course have even more opportunity for new tools and processes, new business models and practices than ever before…which is why today’s workers are so much more productive than they have ever been before. Consider a check out clerk at your local grocery store. In the past a clerk had to manually punch in (and memorize) codes and prices, types of produce, etc. Today a clerk basically scans a bar code, even for produce. What could take several minutes can now be done in a few seconds. The clerk doesn’t have to make change anymore, just swipe a credit or debit card or quickly type in the dollar amount the customer is giving them and the machine makes the change. And lately more stores are move to fully automated checkout, where one clerk now just sits at a counter and watches customers scanning their purchases and paying. In fact, that’s what I do unless I have a whole basket full of things to buy, as it’s so much simpler and quicker.
And more productive all around. So…are the clerks better? No…they are about the same in raw material as they were a decade or half century or century ago. What has changes is that the stores have invested in the automation technology that makes each worker more productive. Such investment, of course, takes capital.
Hope that answered your questions to me…I have to admit, sometimes when I’m posting on a mobile device I get lost in what I was trying to say or what I was supposed to be answering.
-XT
I wonder if the increase in obesity rates in the United States has anything to do with the divergence of US health care spending from other OECD countries. According to the graph on the right, obesity has constantly been on the rise since 1976-1980 after being relatively flat from 1960-1976. I haven’t had time to look into to the trends for other countries, but I would not be surprised to see if the slope is steeper in the US than other countries. In the US, Obesity rose from ~15% in 1976-1980 to ~30% by 2003-2004, roughly doubling. In comparison, in Canada (PDF) it went from ~14% to ~23% over roughly the same period, which is a 65% increase. This link indicates that health care costs are noticeably higher for obese people than non-obese people.
I’m not xtisme, but I dispute the claim. And I have the numbers to back it up.
This is the percentage of wealth held by the top 1% of the population since 1922 to 2006.
Year Share of wealth held by the top 1%
1922 36.70%
1929 44.20%
1933 33.30%
1939 36.40%
1945 29.80%
1949 27.10%
1953 31.20%
1962 31.80%
1965 34.40%
1969 31.10%
1972 29.10%
1976 19.90%
1979 20.50%
1981 24.80%
1983 30.90%
1986 31.90%
1989 35.70%
1992 37.20%
1995 38.50%
1998 38.10%
2001 33.40%
2004 34.30%
2006 32.70%
You may note that it’s been declining since 1995. You may also note that in 2006, the percentage of wealth of the top 1% was below the median of the past 85 years. I can’t find any numbers that include the current recession, but given the losses in the stock market and in real estate, I’d guess that their share of total wealth has gone down even more since 2006.
We were talking about income. Now you want to talk about wealth.
Still, it doesn’t matter. Changes in wealth are no more an example of redistribution than changes in income.
You and I both make $1000. You spend it all, and I spend $900 and save the rest. My total wealth is greater than yours, and no redistribution has taken place.
Next year, my income goes up by $100 and yours goes up by $40. My total wealth and my total income have gone up, and no redistribution has taken place.
The year after that, my income goes up by 20% and yours goes up by 1%. My income, wealth, and total share have all gone up, and no redistribution has taken place.
Now if somebody takes money from me and gives it to you, then redistribution has taken place. That’s what I need a cite for - somebody who took the money from the lower classes and handed it to the wealthy.
Regards,
Shodan
<missed the edit window>
Also notice that the years from 1976 to 1980 were a real outlier - a low water mark for wealth held by the top 1% that wasn’t part of any trend. My guess as to the cause of this was the rapid onset of high inflation, coupled with high marginal tax rates. High inflation wipes out real wealth, and the combination of high marginal rates and high inflation causes huge tax increases due to ‘bracket creep’.
That also explains why the class warriors like to use 1980 as their starting point for showing that wealth is accumulating at the top. Not only does it coincide with the election of the hated Reagan, but conveniently allows the baseline measure to be the lowest point in the past 85 years - the ultimate in cherry picking.
A more reasonable analysis of the data suggests that the top 1% tends to hold about 30-35% of the wealth, and that this percentage doesn’t really change over time. It can go up or down a bit with the business cycle or by changes to tax codes or other financial policies, but seems to consistently recover to about the same levels. There is no trend of the rich getting richer. The rich are doing about the same as they always have when it comes to the amount of wealth they own.
You can see the trends in the data. The high water mark for W1% was in 1929. The stock market crash, depression, and WWII drove it down to 27%. Then the post-war boom drove it back up to 34% by 1965. The inflation and recession of the 1970’s collapsed it all the way to 20%. The long economic expansion that started in 1980 caused it to rise to 35.7% by 1995. The recession in 2001 drove it back down again. Now that we’re in a deep recession, it may turn out that the wealth number will go down even further, and could even wind up looking more like 1980 than 1995 by the time we’re through this - especially if inflation kicks in.
There is no evidence at all to support the assertion that the nation’s wealth is increasingly collecting at the top. None.
Why is it that when the taxation burden is shifted toward the rich, we’re soaking them, but if it’s shifted downward, now the rich are keeping what they earn? How about we let the poor and middle class keep more of what they earn? They worked hard for it, didn’t they?
Do you really think that’s a new development? The productivity line in this graph shows a pretty steady rise since the late 50’s. Automation and efficiency are not new ideas. The current crop of CEO’s did not invent the wheel, they’re just continuing the same practices of previous generations, but being rewarded for it more than even before.
How about when tax rates are changed? Someone has to pay for the things we all use. When the rates are lowered for one group, the burden shifts to someone else. Or are you using the same vocabulary as xtisme; when the rich pay taxes, it’s redistribution, when the rich get a tax break, they’re keeping what they earn?
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
Why is it that when the taxation burden is shifted toward the rich, we’re soaking them, but if it’s shifted downward, now the rich are keeping what they earn? How about we let the poor and middle class keep more of what they earn? They worked hard for it, didn’t they?
[/QUOTE]
Because when you start talking about wealth redistribution, that is pretty much a code phrase for taking significantly more from the rich and (in theory) giving it to the poor. While this seems laudable, on the surface, it generally has just the opposite effect.
I’m all for letting the poor and middle class keep more of what they earn, btw, so you are sort of preaching to the choir. I’m not even opposed to the possibility of direct aid to the poor, though the devil there is in the details. What I’m against is the populist mantra that we need to stick it to the rich. Make marginal adjustments to tweak tax rates and things of that nature? Yeah, I’d be in favor. Soaking the rich to pay for all sorts of new entitlement programs? No, probably not.
Dude…go back and read what I wrote. The time period I was talking about was the last century. My point was that it’s been investment by industry that has enhanced productivity since the industrial revolution. I’m not claiming that the current crop of CEO’s (or the past crop for that matter) invented the processes or procedures…only that they capitalized them, by and large. They reap the rewards because they invested in the process. We reap the rewards as a society as well, since we get all those juicy taxes and jobs and such. It’s a win/win…until people want to overturn the apple cart because they aren’t getting something extra…
-XT
I don’t speak in code. To keep things clear going forward, what phrase should I use to describe incremental changes in income distribution over time?
Oh, I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about just the last generation or so. Let me go back and read your original question again.
Compared to a century ago? Hell, yes. Ask a worker in 1910 about about algebra, science, foreign affairs, and what kind of answers do you think you’d get?
This is the thread I’m talking about :
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=533652&highlight=wolff
You can scroll down to post 45, one you still haven’t answered. The guy quoted in the post is the guy you cited to prove that wealth hasn’t become more concentrated over the past couple of decades, and it turns out he doesn’t agree with you. And this guy Wolff knows what he’s talking about when it comes to wealth. Here’s his bio:
Edward Wolff is a professor of economics at New York University. He is the author of Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It, as well as many other books and articles on economic and tax policy. He is managing editor of the Review of Income and Wealth.
And here’s what he has to say about wealth inequality over the past couple of decades.
MM: What have been the trends of wealth inequality over the last 25 years?
Wolff: We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.
Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.
Income inequality has also risen. Most people date this rise to the early 1970s, but it hasn’t gone up nearly as dramatically as wealth inequality.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm20…iewswolff.html
You can reply to the post in the thread I linked or you can reply to this one.
Here he is again :
These are large inequalities, and they are growing: between 1983 and 1989, the top 20 percent of wealth holders received fully 99 percent of the total gain in national wealth; the wealthiest one percent enjoyed 62 percent of that increase…
Share of wealth owned by top 1%.
1983 33.7
1989 38.9
1992 42.0
From 1983 to 1989, the share of wealth held by the top one percent increased by five percentage points, from 34 to 39 percent, and the share of the top 20 percent rose by three percentage points, from 81.3 to 84.6 percent. By contrast, the share of wealth held by the bottom 80 percent fell sharply, from 19 to 15 percent. Then, between 1989 and 1992, the share of the top one percent of families increased sharply again, from 39 percent in 1989 to 42 percent in 1992.4 The increase in wealth inequality recorded over the 1983-92 period is unprecedented except for the 1920s, when rising concentration was largely attributable to the stock market boom. …
and so on
[QUOTE=Robot Arm]
I don’t speak in code. To keep things clear going forward, what phrase should I use to describe incremental changes in income distribution over time?
[/QUOTE]
You can use whatever term floats thy boat, afaiac. If you are talking about the natural shift in the percentage of wealth owned by any given ‘class’ at any given time, then that isn’t really wealth redistribution…it’s simply a natural progression or shift brought about due to myriad reasons. If you are talking about TAKING wealth from one group and redistributing it to another deliberately and intentionally for reasons of social engineering (or whatever), then that is ‘redistribution’.
No worries…but you are mixing different things I was saying with different questions you were asking.
It depends. Define what a ‘worker’ is, exactly. A factory worker? Mine worker? White collar worker? Clerk? There are whole classes of ‘worker’ that didn’t exist 100 years ago…and whole classes of worker that existed then but don’t exist now. The raw material (i.e. the bio-unit doing the ‘work’, be it factory worker or network engineer), however, hasn’t really changed all that much, not with respect to the amount of productivity being generated today. A professional (architect, say, or doctor/lawyer/etc) was probably MUCH better educated 100 years ago than I am, relatively speaking and considering the knowledge base of the day.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume you are right…today’s check out clerks know algebra, science, foreign affairs an order of magnitude better than they did 100 years ago. Is that the prime factor in making them more productive? I think not. It’s the tools that make them more productive…and, frankly, you could take a young worker from 100 years ago and drop them into most jobs today and they would be just as productive. A manufacturing job is a manufacturing job, after all, and neither require an in-depth knowledge of foreign affairs or science. Same with a check out clerk or a miner, or a laundry list of other jobs. It’s not the people who have become more productive, it’s the tools and methodology and business practices that have MADE them more productive. Just as the tools, methodology and business practices implemented during the industrial revolution made THOSE workers more productive than their earlier counter parts.
As I mentioned earlier, in my own field there has been tremendous change. When I was first getting started in this field everything was CLI…and, generally, very cryptic and esoteric (not to mention different for every vendor) CLI, and in some cases it was dip switch based programming. It took a high level network engineer (or a team of them) to set up even a basic network. Even when micro-networks and early routers and bridges first came out it took a high level engineer to set them up properly. Today, a technician can build out a server, load the OS, and configure it to run on a network in a couple of hours, instead of days. Though I generally design the systems and write the configs, I have technicians (or automated systems) that can punch down a config on a layer 2 or 3 device regularly…something that was unheard of when I was younger. All because the tools make it easy to do.
-XT
And yet in the rebuttal to you, which I DID answer, I showed that the guy’s own numbers didn’t show what he’s claiming.
Wow, what a coincidence that he happened to pick the lowest year for overall wealth held by the top 1% since we started keeping such records 85 years ago. The guy may know his subject, but it looks to me like he’s more than happy to put the biggest tendentious spin on the numbers he possibly can.
How about choosing 1965 as the starting point instead of 1975? Kinda changes the picture, doesn’t it. So tell me, what’s important about 1975, other than that it’s the low? Give me a rational justification for making that the starting point for such a comparison.
A continuous trend of falling wealth inequality from 1929 to the mid-1970’s, huh? Oh, good thing he ended his trend right on the historical low point. Even luckier, he started it on the historical high point. But even so, his own data shows him to be wrong.
For those playing along, here’s the relevant data again:
Year Share of wealth held by the top 1%
1922 36.70%
1929 44.20%
1933 33.30%
1939 36.40%
1945 29.80%
1949 27.10%
1953 31.20%
1962 31.80%
1965 34.40%
1969 31.10%
1972 29.10%
1976 19.90%
and the years he didn't include:
1979 20.50%
1981 24.80%
1983 30.90%
1986 31.90%
1989 35.70%
1992 37.20%
1995 38.50%
1998 38.10%
2001 33.40%
2004 34.30%
2006 32.70%
Notice that top 1%'s wealth increased from 1933 to 1938, then again from 1949 through 1965 - at which point it was higher than it was in 1933.
Your cite took the two opposing outliers in the data and used them as his start and end points. This did indeed show an overall decline - it was rigged to do so. But there’s no ‘continuous’ decline. There’s a series of peaks and valleys with no real discernible trend. You can pull this trick with any data set so long as the variance is greater than the signal. I can draw a line from the peak of a sine wave to the trough of an another, ignoring the waves in between, to ‘show’ that the signal is decreasing over time. But it’s really not, is it? I just drew a biased line by cherry-picking the end points.
See, this is ridiculous. Wealth inequality by his own measure has been decreasing since 1998, and is currently below the historical mean. Yet he’s painting a picture of the wealthy slowly bleeding the rest of the people dry. It’s dishonest.
Hey, can I play?
“Between 1965 and 2006, the share of wealth held by the top 1% actually declined by 1.7%.”
Why is your statistic any more valid than mine? Both are based on the same data set. I’d argue that mine’s superior, because it ends on the last data point in the series. Yours appears to end, suprisingly enough, at a peak value in the middle of the data set. How come?
Workers cannot take their skills elsewhere for obvious reasons. There are no jobs to be had in the United States.
Workers in the United States are not more skilled now, but they are just as skilled. The only reason they are not more skilled is that the human race doesn’t evolve that fast. They are as skilled as can possibly be for a labor workforce of any kind in any part of the world.
Everyone looks at this issue from the wrong perspective. You look at global competition and think, “we should reduce the standard of living of our blue-collar workforce so that they can compete with those around the world!” What you fail to recognize, or possibly willfully neglect, is that the rest of the world exploits its labor force and subjects them to inhuman conditions. We have so-called ethical work laws in this country. Laws that we now take for granted. But we somehow have no problem forgetting about these values when it’s a worker in China or Mexico. Workers in China, who make the parts on the cars that you drive, have to literally stand inside the giant metal press. They manually move the parts to the correct position and then have to literally squat and duck as the press slams down to stamp out the part. And they do this for a minimal wage that can barely feed themselves and their family. It’s not uncommon for employees to get squashed in these machines, but they are easily replaced by new workers who need to eat and feed their children. If this were the case in the United States everyone, even the most “conservative,” would be up in arms. But somehow you still seem to find an argument to present that our workers just need to get with the game and be more productive. It’s BS and most of you know it. The solution is not to lower our standards to the inhumane standards of the rest of the world, but to stop supporting those inhumane standards proposed by the rest of the world. Every single person reading this thread regularly purchases something made with literal human slave labor, but justifies it as unavoidable. The focus shouldn’t be on the so-called productivity of the American worker. We have all the skill, and ambition to out-compete anyone in the world if being presented on a fair and humane playing field.
And while you judge and rate the performance of the labor force (while you are the real problem), keep in mind that not only are these people necessary for a properly functioning economy, but they are leaps and bounds of higher character than those who judge them. You decide to do something different because you don’t want to raise your hand to go to the bathroom at work. Because you don’t want to sacrifice 30 plus years of your life tearing down your body. You don’t want the mind numbing job of doing the same task every 24 seconds, all day long. You do what you do precisely so that you don’t have to do what they do. And in the process you try to negate their importance. Through your own ignorance you collectively drive down the competitive power of the United States, and significantly lower the standard of living (even your own) of the entire country. All in the name of a personal and short sighted ego. You are not more evolved or more intelligent than the average labor worker, and your condescending commentary doesn’t make your delusion true.
This is what has gone wrong with the US economy.
Not according to this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Share_top_1%25.jpg
I would be more interested in the top 20% more than the top 1%. A rising tide lifts all boats right? Has the past 50 years benefited the middle class, increased their numbers or made the top 20% richer at the expense of the middle class. I really can’t believe people can say the middle class isn’t being slowly eroded away.
I wonder about this in relation to electronics. I know most middle class households in the 1960s had a color TV which cost hundreds of dollars at that time. So was a $600 color tv in 60s wages less expensive that our ISP connections and cell phones?
Your graphic shows income, not wealth. We’re talking about wealth.
Normally when you reply to somebody’s post it appears below the post. There’s on ly one more post after mine in that thread and it isn’t one of yours.
Now I’m guessing that this guy knows his own work better than you do. Where did you get “his” numbers from. Can you link where you got those numbers from please?
