There is ~5-10 ways I want to comment / react. Hard to choose the first one..
There is a nonzero aim to cause outrage by the distribution chart & even more by the explanatory video. Perhaps we should defuse this as first angle of response.
Not all inequality is good/bad and not all is undeserved. And not all inequality is correctly described by net wealth alone with no additional measures or dimensions.
We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.
In 10-15y one of them will be a millionaire and the other will be a poverty line retire without a pension.
And does the wealth include the pension pot? If you don't do anything silly, by the time you're nearing retirement you're sitting on a 500k home equity (split with the wife) + 500k each in retirement plans. So if you + the mrs both work a median job you end up with $1-2m family wealth.
Capitalism in EU works with different constraints and frictions so that we get less millionaires and also less people with negative wealth but the median family wealth (near retirement) in US is much higher than in EU.
There is a nonzero aim to cause outrage by the distribution chart & even more by the explanatory video. Perhaps we should defuse this as first angle of response.
Not all inequality is good/bad and not all is undeserved. And not all inequality is correctly described by net wealth alone with no additional measures or dimensions.
We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.
In 10-15y one of them will be a millionaire and the other will be a poverty line retire without a pension.
And does the wealth include the pension pot? If you don't do anything silly, by the time you're nearing retirement you're sitting on a 500k home equity (split with the wife) + 500k each in retirement plans. So if you + the mrs both work a median job you end up with $1-2m family wealth.
Capitalism in EU works with different constraints and frictions so that we get less millionaires and also less people with negative wealth but the median family wealth (near retirement) in US is much higher than in EU.