An important element of the conversation is 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? A group's lack of upward movement is not unjust if their groups actions do not justify a movement upward.

Additionally we also have to recall that the quintile's populations are not necessarily static. to illustrate the idea: members of a quintile may join an adjacent quintile in the next time period. That is, bottom members may move up, top members may move down, mid members may move either way. To the extent their movements are justified by their actions/choices is to the extent we have a fair society.

That is, if people are getting rich from sources not related to taking right actions, or people are taking good actions and getting poorer -- then we have an unjust society.

This can both apply to Rich people abusing their power to get rich, but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned.

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.

What is the issue with wealth compounding? The bottom 40% have a very high value asset -- their agency and actions in the real world. (Working, starting a business (however small), self sufficiency et al.).

The prices of true essentials are exceedingly small. Essential is something like sharing a room with someone, eating rice beans frozen veg mix (ie very inexpensively), wearing clothes from thrift stores, exercising outside and using a library card, medicaid. Everything beyond that is, technically, optional.

Having wealth aiding the overall return doesn't negate my point. Using wealth to get an unjust return does. An example of a better return would be hiring a financial advisor that (somehow) creates better returns using smarter allocations. An example of an unjust return would be creating a monopoly, buying a politician, or extracting profits from unpriced externalities (pollution and bailouts to name a couple). (These do happen in the USA, and I'm all for ending them!)

There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating).

I do, however, like Scott Galloway's point that we need to find new ways to get the rich to spend their money, we need the poor to start 10000 businesses that gratify the rich and extract their money. Right now they're mostly accumulating it and bidding up investible assets (eg look athe P/E multiple of the S&P 500) .

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.

> "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).

I hold, i guess as a basic principle, that tyranny of the majority is an unjust failure case of democratic systems.

Fully agree Citizen's united has resulted in legalized corruption. But 2 wrongs do not make a right, ethically.

There's nothing unjust about a rich person getting superior results through access to better resources though. Eg hiring a better tax accountant or financial advisor.

>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?

I mean, Piketty showed this a decade ago in capital in the 21th century: the higher your income percentile and wealth percentile, the higher saving rate and the higher returns on your investment (which is negative for folks at the bottom of the distribution).

Of course the other problem with the projection is that BLS average expenses aren’t super accurate to project what people are spending on at those income percentiles :)

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

This is vibe coded I guess? Toggling the "Happiness plateau line" does nothing.

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

> Code under the MIT License

If the code is written by an LLM, then it can't be copyrighted, and a license can't be applied.

fixed.

I shape economy is real

Okay, this site is becoming unreadable slop.

Flag and move on

i’m pretty skeptical of this analysis because it (by default) hides the effect of welfare and advocates for a wealth tax. Hiding the existing social safety net in order to advocate for taxes feels very propagandistic.

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?