elodieunderglass:

pureslime:

pureslime:

pureslime:

Good people aren’t wealthy.

Let me make this clear here. It’s actually impossible to hoard millions in personal fortune and also live an ethical life.

Some people are taking this as a personal attack against their families, who make something in the six figure range. This post is not about you. In full scale, families like that are not what I’d consider to be “wealthy”.

I’m talking about the multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs, politicians, and media moguls. This isn’t about your uncle who’s a surgeon and saves people’s lives. Please don’t misinterpret that. They’re not nearly on the same scale of “wealthy”.

But if your uncle is the head of a multinational corporation that utilizes cheap overseas labour and exploits third world countries, fuck that guy actually.

(NB: US-centric economic discussion. Long post. Press J to skip.)

Americans think that the country’s wealth looks like this:

Above is is a rather famous graph that shows where Americans think the money is. Americans think that the distribution of income in America looks like these pretty colors. The very richest people, the top 20% (all the fancy millionaires and Bill Gates and, like…. the richest rich Hollywood celebrities???) are the yellow bar, and Americans assigned them a little more than half the money in the country. Next comes the orange, the Really Rich Folks. Americans think that the Rich Folks (whom we picture as the brilliant cardiac surgeons and brilliant bankers and eccentric uncles with mansions – the Rich Folks you can realistically dream of being), have a good chunk of the wealth in the country; maybe 20%. And they believe the upper middle class (red) has almost as much wealth as the Rich Folks (Those in the red are the ‘rich’ people that we know personally, after all, so that sounds sensible.) The working class and poor folks (dark blue – the bottom 20%) even holds some of the country’s wealth as well. You can see the rationale. There are lots of working class and poor people in the USA, so all of their money put together must add up to something. 

What if you ask Americans to sketch out the ideal income distribution?

If you ask the Americans where they think the money should be, they say it should be distributed the way it is in the graph above. Look at that nice, fair-looking distribution. This isn’t particularly revolutionary. It wasn’t a poll of leftist Tumblr children. This is a fairly good, balanced study presented by Harvard. The polled Americans say that in an ideal world, there should be more money in the class with the upper-middle-class folks (red) than they think there currently is; there should be more wealth resting with the hardworking folks, the happily-white-collar people, the normal-rich ones. America thinks it’s only fair that we have more wealth resting with those folks, and a little bit less wealth with Mark Zuckerberg (yellow). America believes firmly that the orange (brilliant cardiac surgeons, famous musicians) are okay where they are – that they have a fair amount of the wealth and their portion can stay the same. In their ideal world, Americans also expanded the ordinary middle class (light blue). These normal Americans generally think that this class, which almost all Americans believe that they belong to, should have more wealth. And the working class (people who can’t afford vacations or new cars, and everyone poorer than that) should have more general wealth than they do. That’s only fair, Americans say, as they arrange this ideal distribution of wealth. This would be a satisfactory balance of money.

Here’s the actual distribution of wealth in the United States:

Yeah… yeah.

Here’s all the graphs together:

Yeah. The wealth of the nation disproportionately belongs to the top 20% of rich people. The rest of the middle and lower classes are crushed into less than 20% of the rest of the wealth, savaging each other for crumbs.

So, no, nobody cares about your Rich Uncle Joe. Nobody is particularly thirsting to put Rich Uncle Joe ‘first against the wall when the revolution comes’ if that’s what people are afraid of.

Rich Uncle Joe the surgeon probably makes about $300,000 per year if he’s a decent general surgeon at an ordinary American hospital. Rich Uncle Joe’s decent, hardworking, saves-lives-every-day income is the orange-ish line in the graph below. (These are deeply shitty colors, by the way.) Rich Uncle Joe is definitely richer than a poor person, but his six-figure income isn’t influencing the nation.

Because the runaway red line in this graph is the 1%.

This graph is also showing you time. In 1979, when incomes were more equal, Rich Uncle Joe would have been Handsomely Rich, a man who commanded respect and moderate wealth, a man able to hold up his head in the company of the truly wealthy people in the nation. He might even perceive himself as being in the same social class as the Rich. He might build himself a fine mansion, golf with political influencers, hire a personal secretary, and invite the rich folks over for dinner (fondue, natch, in a wood-panelled den with a Persian rug) and count himself as an equal.

By 2007, the super-rich had separated themselves utterly from Rich Uncle Joe. Their money makes more money than Rich Uncle Joe makes. Rich Uncle Joe might impress a starry-eyed tumblr teen who really needs the $50 that his wife slips into their birthday card (“I have rich people in my family and ACTUALLY they’re lovely!”) but he has been left behind.  Like OP says: Uncle Joe is not located on the same scale. His wealth is a fraction, which the oligarchs don’t stoop to notice. Also note: 2007, where this graph leaves off, was ten years ago. When The Economist published a graph of American wealth inequality in 2017, they had to break it into pieces to look good in the magazine, because they couldn’t show the 1% on the same graph as everyone else and have it look meaningful. Even with Rich Uncle Joe working his little butt off during all the hours God sends him, he can’t raise the average wage of the 99% until you can see it on a nicely formatted graph. He’s in the top 20-40% of wealthy people in the USA but he is closer to us than to them.

And, given that general surgeons work themselves to death and have mounting levels of educational debt, Rich Uncle Joe’s best hope for his earthly reward is to have all of his debts (including his mortgage) paid off and his retirement savings secured before he loses his hands, meaning that he will have to work 60+ hour weeks at antisocial times in order to be able to stop working when he’s 65, with enough money to cover the remaining 20 years of his life, including the expensive eldercare that he and his wife will require. Since one or the other is statistically increasingly likely to come down with a debilitating illness as they age – cancer or dementia or a stroke, and so on – and the costs of healthcare and eldercare are skyrocketing, Uncle Joe will always feel like he has to hustle to ensure comfort and survival in his winter years. Rich Uncle Joe is ‘rich,’ so he’ll want a private room if he has to go into a nursing home for the end of his life; the average cost of an ordinary private room in the USA in 2016 was $253 per day, so if he wants him and his wife to die in comfort, he will think of this increasingly as he gets older; a fact he is never able to forget or set aside, because he works in healthcare and knows what happens… 

And those are the people that Americans assume are comfortable and happy and positively rolling in their well-earned wealth…

Because here’s the thing: Americans, we all think we’re middle class! We think we’re doing okay, and if we work really hard, we’ll probably get rich. Maybe if we win the lottery or publish that fantasy novel, we’ll be super-rich. So we, Americans, we don’t ask too much of the rich. We make things nice for the rich, because we imagine that one day, we will be one of them. AMERICANS DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE RICH ARE. Americans picture ourselves being “rich” and we picture ourselves shopping at the expensive store, going out to eat, living in The Nicest House On the Main Street of Lobster Neck, Massachusetts and going on one (1) vacation to Italy. We say, “Oh, let’s not make things TOO hard for the rich, because that’s what I’m going to be someday.” 

STOP THIS. THAT FANTASY LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, BUT IT IS THE TINIEST SLICE OF THE HUMBLEST PIE. THE RICH HAVE THE WHOLE BIG PIE, LEAVING THE REST OF US A SCATTERING OF CRUMBS TO FIGHT OVER, AND THAT FANTASY LIFE IS SIMPLY A SLIGHTLY LARGER CRUMB. You are picturing yourself rich, but you are picturing simply an ant on the table, holding up that large crumb, going “ooh, this piece of crust has a tiny dot of cherry filling stuck to it! I’m rich!” and somewhere someone in the distance has an ACTUAL CHERRY and everyone’s like “WOW YEAH one day I’ll win the lottery and get the BIG CHERRY TOO!” but, you know, we aren’t exactly dividing up the pie. The Republican guy who votes to make things nicer for rich people, and votes to make things worse for poor people, genuinely thinks that he’s a middle-class guy with an enviously high standard of living, who is absolutely going to be rich someday. He’s good and moral, he thinks, and he is going to get the big crumb like Uncle Joe. 

His whole world is crumbs, in which looms that beautiful mental picture of the slightly bigger crumb.

He can’t conceive of the pie. He cannot picture what pie looks like. He thinks pie is what happens when you get, like, three whole cherries together. So he votes, thinking he is supporting the possibility of cherries for Normal Guys Like Him. 

Stop picturing Uncle Joe when you picture “the rich.” The rich we’re talking about wouldn’t even give Uncle Joe a seat at a dinner party.

Anyway, I myself don’t really believe in revolution. and cutesy leftist slogans make me a Tired. But I hate it when people shovel shit and call it sugar. And then get mad when people point out that it’s shit. Like, if you’re doing this, the people you’re stanning for hold you in contempt, if they think of you at all! Have a little gotdamn dignity.