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[Max™]

I was talking about the growth since the drop, where all of the recovery has gone back into their pockets and more.

[Reelya]

But if you didn't have the drop in the first place they'd have been even richer now. If you project the trend lines from 2000-2006 forward assuming that no crash happened, then they'd be massively more wealthy than they are now.

[Frumple]

Your chart is kinda sorta slightly outdated, and showing income, not wealth... which is a MASSIVE difference.

Uhh, your graph in fact backs up my argument, it doesn't refute it. Note the big asset wipe out in 2007-2009 in your graph. Also note that the steepest drop was the assets of the top 1%. They lost the largest percentage of their wealth of any cohort listed.

so you're skeptical that any bubble popping will wipe out the rich? It's exactly what your graph shows happened in 2008.

that wasn't "wipe out the rich" tho, it was "mildly inconvenience them while they proceeded to sup on everyone else's losses"

Nevermind their relative proportion of control seems to have barely budged and the bottom half of the population's share is so small you can't eyeball how badly they got fucked over lol

[Max™]

But if you didn't have the drop in the first place they'd have been even richer now. If you project the trend lines from 2000-2006 forward assuming that no crash happened, then they'd be massively more wealthy than they are now.

Similarly if you project the trends for the other percentiles, they'd still end up having gained a smaller chunk of the overall pie than the tip top handful did. The top 0.1% ~ 0.01% did significantly better than everyone else in the recovery, and that sucks no matter how you slice it.

[Reelya]

My point however is that it's not the crash and recovery that did that. They were on track to be even richer than they are now, if no crash had happened. "recovery" implies there's some sort of base line that things "recover" to, and the rich got an unfair share of that. That's probably false. There is no base-line and the rich have been getting an ever unfairer share in what we call the "good years" and this has been going on for countless decades.

If the crash hadn't happened, things would probably be even more unequal now:
Note that the top 1% cohort lost a lot more both percentage-wise and in total wealth than the more middle cohorts. For example, the top 1% dropped 25% in total wealth in 18 months, $5 trillion, while the 90-99% cohort only dropped 8%, or about 2 trillion, and the next 50-90 cohort lost 15% about $2 trillion as well (figures from Max's link). So the top 1% lost more than the other top 49% combined. Hell, the top 1% lost more wealth than the other 99% of people in the country.

The starting situation isn't ideal but that kind of thing does fuck over the 1%'ers.

The point is, we call it the good times when the rich are storming ahead, and the doom-and-gloom times are when the rich are facing losses.

[scriver]

Side question about that graph: Do the top right years and numbers just refer to that it starts with the third quarter of 1989 and ends with the second quarter of 2019?

[Reelya]

Let me make my point with figures from Max's chart.

Let's look at average wealth growth of the top 1% vs the bottom 50%

This is the baseline:

1989Q3 top 1% = 4.88 trillion, bottom 50% = 0.76 trillion

This is the 2007 peak, let's let this represent growth before the GFC:

2007Q3 top 1% = 20.09 trillion, bottom 50% = 1.23 trillion

You can use these figures to work out the average % wealth growth for each group over the 18 years, by working out the factor of the increase and taking an 18-root of that number:
 
The top 1% gained ~8.18% wealth per year in this period
The bottom 50% gained ~ 2.71% wealth per year in this period
So, you can see from these figures that the 1% were gaining wealth in percentage terms 3 times as fast the bottom 50%, for the 18 years up until the crash.

So let's look at the 2019 figures, and work out who gained the most from the 2007 peak to now. This will give a fair indication of the effects of both the crash and recovery.

2019Q2 top 1% = 34.73 trillion, bottom 50% = 2.02 trillion

Calling that 12 years , the rich gained wealth at 4.67% per annum in this period, which is nearly half the rate they were gaining in the 18 years from 1989 - 2007. Meanwhile, the poor went from 1.23 trillion to 2.02 trillion, a factor of ~1.64, which on a yearly basis is a gain of 4.22%, so wealth-growth for the bottom 50% has actually accelerated.

So, the top 1% now gain about 4.67% wealth per year vs the bottom 50% on 4.22%, instead of the old 8.18% to 2.71%. This is my point. There really isn't evidence that they've done "better out of the recovery" than the bottom 50%. Pulling down the house of cards ends up being a leveler.

[hector13]

You’re using percentages. Percentages don’t tell you the real story, and not much beyond trends and proportions.

Prior to the crash, the 1% could buy everything they’d ever need over an entire lifetime several times over, and they still could after the crash. They lost a great deal of wealth, as one might imagine in a crash, but nothing they couldn’t handle.

The crash didn’t level the playing field in any capacity. There are people still struggling to recover (wages are just now returning to pre-crash levels for example) from it, so you need more than superficial statistical analysis to support that claim.

[dragdeler]

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[Kagus]

$Many. At least.

[Max™]

If you're over 100k a year then you're just on the upper end of the income chart, not sure what the assets breakdown is.

I'm confused how you get some of those numbers for the 1% though, it doesn't look like the chart is showing relative proportions like yours did (as in only the 1% colored section is theirs) it looks like straight numbers, so the 1% went from over ~62 Trillion in wealth down to over ~55 Trillion in wealth and back up to something over ~105 Trillion in wealth.

Over the same period it looks like the bottom 50% went from maybe 2 Trillion, down to less than 1 Trillion, and back up a bit over 2 Trillion?

I know the bottom percentile has negative wealth, while the top 0.1% and 0.01% have ridiculously huge chunks of the total wealth in the US.

Note: ublock/umatrix/my CSS rules doesn't want to let me see the numbers on the fed reserve site properly so I can't make head or tail of the gibberish it shows.

[McTraveller]

This is not a difficult thing to search for on the internet folks.

50th percentile in 2017 was a net wealth of just over $97000.  For 2019, the income percentile is about $63k in income for a household to be in the 50th percentile. (I don't know why I couldn't find the 2019 wealth percentiles quickly, it's a Mystery!)

Also, I think that the wealth distribution is really a red herring in terms of wealth. What really matters is if the lower wealth / income brackets are high enough to have an enjoyable and sustainable standard of living.  Yes I know there are psychological effects if your neighbor has 10 times what you have, and I agree it feels ridiculous that there are people who have multiple-lifetimes' worth of resources at their disposal.  But if your poorest have sustainable food, housing, and health security then the "wealth gap" is really just a tool to manipulate the masses.

Of course, we don't have a minimum where the poorest have food, housing, and health security; those are too tightly tied to employment.  The conservative side of me says they should be tied to some extent to employment, but you should not lose health insurance or your house if you are out a job for a week.  And no, I don't count COBRA as generally it's expensive and terrible.

[Reelya]

You’re using percentages. Percentages don’t tell you the real story, and not much beyond trends and proportions.

Prior to the crash, the 1% could buy everything they’d ever need over an entire lifetime several times over, and they still could after the crash. They lost a great deal of wealth, as one might imagine in a crash, but nothing they couldn’t handle.

The crash didn’t level the playing field in any capacity. There are people still struggling to recover (wages are just now returning to pre-crash levels for example) from it, so you need more than superficial statistical analysis to support that claim.

Yes, but I was responding specifically to a claim of "but my graph proves you wrong" by using data from that same graph.

Also the existence of "people struggling to recover" seems like anecdotal evidence. People are always struggling. If the top 1% were gaining 8% wealth per year and the bottom 50% gaining 2.7% wealth per year before the crash, but now both are in the 4.5% p/a range that in itself is significant. You say the rich are still getting richer? no shit. But if the previous trajectory held they would be gaining wealth about twice as fast, and the bottom 50% about half as fast as that data suggests. But, it's not actually that far off right now from the bottom 50% gaining wealth faster, in percentage terms than the top 1%. Combating tax loopholes and reducing the cost of healthcare would probably push things into the realm when the bottom 50% are gaining percentage wealth faster than the top 1% in the USA now. Point is: the thing where the rich gain money faster than the poor pre-dates the crash, and was much worse before the crash.

Also, that graph is wealth, which is excess after wages. When I focused on income, people said "but wealth is the true marker!". Now I'm focusing on the wealth data that was provided, and now it's jumping back to "but you're neglecting income!" which seems like circular logic.

[Frumple]

Of course, we don't have a minimum where the poorest have food, housing, and health security; those are too tightly tied to employment.  The conservative side of me says they should be tied to some extent to employment, but you should not lose health insurance or your house if you are out a job for a week.

Eh... I understand the sentiment, but ultimately I don't think -- especially in the richest country on the bloody planet -- anyone should be going homeless, starving, or dying of preventable or curable health concerns, even if they don't work. The price for that should be at most a lack of luxuries, not fucking dying, or starving, or living on the streets, y'know? Nevermind that means testing and junk has largely been proven wasteful horseshit, maybe we should just be sparing some of that world dominating pile of resources to provide a bare goddamn minimum for our people, preferably without forcing them to make their lives extra shit to gain access to it.

Just. Food, water, shelter. Access to a doctor without it permafucking their lives. Whatever your condition or (lack of) employment. If problems arise from just making sure people have that, we can figure out where to go from there, a point where people have a chance to be healthy and not have to worry about fucking dying from some sort of privation or ruining themselves financially to avoid it. Can't imagine said problems would be worse than the shit we deal with now, if they even meaningfully crop up to begin with.

[Reelya]

And a big point of where the money is going to come from ... why do you think USA has such a big prison population compared to just about anywhere else? So, the nation saves pennies on not providing basic needs, then not surprisingly there's a lot of crime, and you spend big bucks to put them in prison. The cost of prisons is estimated here as $182 billion per year. Better services would probably knock that in half, saving about $100 billion a year. Plus all the other associated costs of an elevated crime rate. People say they don't want to pay for others to eat, then wonder why their insurance premiums are so high and they're paying so much in taxes and why the police are so heavily armed. It's all linked.

EDIT: some would argue against that by saying "criminals are naturally criminal, so improving services won't reduce crime at all". But, the logical response to that is to ask: why only in the USA then? Are Americans just naturally more criminally inclined than other nations?