What It Takes to Be in the 1% Around the World

[garyfdl]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

I was playing with The Political Compass a while back. You get to see where you sit on the political spectrum, at least according to this tool's interpretation.

OMG!!!

I'm Economic Left/Right: -7.63 --- Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.79

Does this mean I have to turn in my guns?

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by garyfdl

OMG!!!

I'm Economic Left/Right: -7.63 --- Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.79

Does this mean I have to turn in my guns?

See, hours of fun. I always knew you were one of us .

[garyfdl]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

See, hours of fun. I always knew you were one of us .

Oh shuddup an gimme a beer! (Got any Schooner?)

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Cool.

Looking only at this data, it suggests that countries that lean more "socialist" have greater rates of yacht ownership.

The rates only include registered boats. Norway, Sweden, UK and many other European countries does not require registration for pleasure boats of normal size.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by danstanford

I haven't gone to the study, but do you know if this statement of assets is before or after debt? Further, the data probably is not available yet but it would be interesting to note the increase in assets over the last 24-36 months as real estate values have spiked.

Wealth, or net worth, is defined as total assets minus total liabilities.

Assets are resources with economic value. Think houses, retirement funds, and savings accounts. Almost three-quarters of aggregate household assets are in the form of financial assets; namely stocks, and mutual funds, retirement accounts, and closely-held businesses. Real estate makes up the vast majority of nonfinancial assets.

Liabilities, or debt, is the opposite. Think mortgages, student loans, and car loans. Not surprisingly, over two-thirds of that debt is in our homes, followed by student loans.

In America, the top 20 percent held 77 percent of total household wealth in 2016, more than triple what the middle class held, defined as the middle 60 percent of the usual income distribution. In fact, the top one percent alone holds more wealth than the middle class. They owned 29 percent [over $25 trillion] of household wealth in 2016, while the middle class owned just $18 trillion.

Before 2010, the middle class owned more wealth than the top one percent. Since 1995, the share of wealth held by the middle class has steadily declined, while the top one percent’s share has steadily increased.

Sourced from:
“Six facts about wealth in the United States” ~ by Isabel V. Sawhill and Christopher Pulliam, 2019, for the Brookings Institution
➥ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-fr...united-states/

[JBP]

Originally Posted by GordMay

If that amount were divided evenly across the U.S. population of 329 million, it would result in over $343,000 for each person. For a family of three, that’s over a million dollars in assets - enough to finance a modest cruising yacht.

Not really a fair conclusion, if you liquidate all the wealth, meaning all the property, all the capital assets, all the stock market in order to buy everyone a $343,000 boat, it would be quite the disaster.

IMHO "socialist" has become just a word some people in the US use to refer to any country that has better healthcare than us.

[poiu]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Bernie Sander's political perspectives would make him pretty centrist in Canada, and I believe most other top yacht-owning countries ().

I was playing with The Political Compass a while back. You get to see where you sit on the political spectrum, at least according to this tool's interpretation. It's hours of fun. They've situation Bernie as a comparator. He's situated in the bottom-left quadrant, but not deeply so. Hardly a radical by global standards.

Nice idea, but it is totally inaccurate on both scales, especially on the authoritarianism scale. It puts me next to Nicola Sturgeon and Angela Merkel, whereas I am much closer to Ayn Rand. Also, Trump is far more Libertarian than portrayed. I think the creators are a bit left wing and have no idea what Libertarianism is. There is a baked in assumption that the left is somewhat libertarian, so all leftists rate higher than they should on that scale, yet by nature the left is all about state control and compulsion and is therefore the antithesis of libertarian.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by poiu

Nice idea, but it is totally inaccurate on both scales, especially on the authoritarianism scale. It puts me next to Nicola Sturgeon and Angela Merkel, whereas I am much closer to Ayn Rand. Also, Trump is far more Libertarian than portrayed. I think the creators are a bit left wing and have no idea what Libertarianism is. There is a baked in assumption that the left is somewhat libertarian, so all leftists rate higher than they should on that scale, yet by nature the left is all about state control and compulsion and is therefore the antithesis of libertarian.

Or maybe you don't know yourself (and others) as well as you think. I'm reading an excellent book right now which I highly recommend to everyone who thinks they know themselves:

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...e-not-so-smart
by David McRaney

Should be required reading for all of us wanting to participate in these kinds of discussions .

[AKA-None]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

Yes... so do Americans.

As I said, it's not obvious to me that Canada has a higher proportion of its population living close to a coast or shoreline.

Yeah and I’ve been to some of those lakes in the summer and a lot of bugs. A whole lot of bugs most of which either bite or you breathe

And in the winter the water is a solid

Not counting the fact there is a lot of smallish bodies of water

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by poiu

There is a baked in assumption that the left is somewhat libertarian, so all leftists rate higher than they should on that scale, yet by nature the left is all about state control and compulsion and is therefore the antithesis of libertarian.

The left is NOT all about state control and compulsion. It's acknowledging that life is about more than a no-rules scrabble for individual acquisition, and that there are collective rights as well as individual rights.

Most people want the same freedoms, built on top of a functional safety net and dependable infrastructure, and where a collective approach is used where it makes the most sense - eg poverty, mass transit, healthcare, education.

Question: If universal single-payer healthcare delivers a better overall level of healthcare at a lower cost, leading to a healthier and more mobile workforce and higher productivity... is universal single-payer healthcare a capitalist or socialist move? Discuss.

PS: Ayn Rand lived on Social Security.

[letsgetsailing3]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

The left is NOT all about state control and compulsion.

It's not ALL about that, but it is a key component.


Eventually, however, they run out of other people's money.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by letsgetsailing3

It's not ALL about that, but it is a key component.

No it isn't. Both capitalism and socialism are only possible in a nation of laws with the means to enforce them. Whether your nation is busy enforcing individual and property rights, or ensuring that all citizens receive a decent education... you have a big state collecting and spending tax.

There are no successful working examples of either pure socialism or pure capitalism, of course. All prosperous nations utilize a blend of individual and collective rights and mechanisms.

Eventually, however, they run out of other people's money.

Asserting that the left are mainly about government control and wealth distribution is just part of right-wing mythology. Wealth is redistributed in both capitalist and socialist systems; the only practical differences are the mechanisms of redistribution and who benefits.

[letsgetsailing3]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

No it isn't. Both capitalism and socialism are only possible in a nation of laws with the means to enforce them. Whether your nation is busy enforcing individual and property rights, or ensuring that all citizens receive a decent education... you have a big state collecting and spending tax.

There are no successful working examples of either pure socialism or pure capitalism, of course. All prosperous nations utilize a blend of individual and collective rights and mechanisms.

Asserting that the left are mainly about government control and wealth distribution is just part of right-wing mythology. Wealth is redistributed in both capitalist and socialist systems; the only practical differences are the mechanisms of redistribution and who benefits.

The left is ALL about government control. And redistribution.

The leftist ideal only works if you cede your freedoms to their control.

Capitalism is more of a self-regulating free-for-all.

Public ownership and private ownership are contrasting things. Government control contrasts with freedom.

Sure, in reality our society is a blend of these things. Markets do better with regulation and some level of governance. Society works better if the government is there to manage infrastructure and to help out the destitute.

There are plenty of examples of varying degrees of socialism and capitalism.

But it's not just about who benefits. It's a basic philosophical difference in where the control is, and how much one values personal freedoms vs government control. The extremes of either is problematic.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

... Asserting that the left are mainly about government control and wealth distribution is just part of right-wing mythology. Wealth is redistributed in both capitalist and socialist systems; the only practical differences are the mechanisms of redistribution and who benefits.

In point of fact, this discussion is about the redistribution of wealth, from the vast common, to a few private uber-wealthy.

The upward redistribution of income has cost American workers over $50 trillion, over the past several [5] decades.

According to a working paper [1], by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards, of the RAND Corporation, had the more equitable [but unequal] income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans, earning below the 90th percentile, would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone.
That is an amount equal to nearly 12 percent of GDP - enough to more than double median income - enough to pay every single working American, in the bottom nine deciles, an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.

Price and Edwards calculate that the cumulative tab, for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality, had grown to over $47 trillion, from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number would have crossed the $50 trillion, mark by early 2020 [$55T by now].

As Price and Edwards explain [1], from 1947 through 1974, real incomes grew close to the rate of per capita economic growth, across all income levels. That means that, for those three post war decades, those at the bottom, and middle of the distribution, saw their incomes grow, at about the same rate as those at the top. This was the era in which America built the world’s largest, and most prosperous middle class, an era in which inequality between income groups steadily shrank (even as shocking inequalities between the sexes and races largely remained).

But, around 1975, this extraordinary era of broadly shared prosperity came to an end. Since then, the wealthiest Americans, particularly those in the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent, have managed to capture an ever-larger share of the nation’s economic growth - in fact, almost all of it - their real incomes skyrocketing, as the vast majority of Americans saw little if any gains.

The higher your income, the larger your percentage gains. As a result, the top 1 percent’s share of total taxable income has more than doubled, from 9 percent in 1975, to 22 percent in 2018, while the bottom 90 percent have seen their income share fall, from 67 percent, to 50 percent. This represents a direct transfer of income [and over time, wealth] from the vast majority of working Americans, to a handful at the very top.
And this redistribution of wealth, upward, continues, unabated.

[1] “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018" ~ by Carter C. Price, Kathryn A. Edwards [2020]
➥ https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

Most of the above was “stolen” from a 2020 “Time” magazine article, by Nick Hanauer and David M. Rolf
➥ https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion...ality-america/

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by letsgetsailing3

But it's not just about who benefits. It's a basic philosophical difference...

Oh I agree here. Approaching a religion in some people.

It's religious to stick with a high-cost non-universal for-profit healthcare system when just about every other prosperous country has adopted some form of universal managed care system, single-payer or otherwise. They're cheaper, more efficient and produce better overall outcomes. Only ideological purity - and formidible lobbying - keep the inefficient and morally-backwards for-profit systems in place.

Most of your other points there are just catechisms. Capitalism is also wealth redistribution, with different mechanisms and beneficiaries. It has its uses.

Collective ownership of some assets - eg parks, harbours and waterways, highways etc - makes them available for the enjoyment of all, not just the wealthy. It increases freedom. Better health, the removal of the shackles of company health plans, ending the fear of bankruptcy from illness - that's enhanced freedom too. Are you after genuine freedom for individuals, or just the freedom to grab all you can? It's not working all that well. [thanks Gord]