No, that $90K figure is adjusted for inflation. Basically, someone making the median income today can’t afford as many chocolate bars at their 1970 counterpart, whereas someone at the very top of the income spectrum today could buy several times as many chocolate bars as his 1970 counterpart.
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Do you mean something like this? ( Median Household Income, Unadjusted and Adjusted for Household Size: 1970-2006 | Pew Research Center )
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I am not sure that it is true that a dramatic increase in government intervention is necessary to reverse wealth inequality. A lot of what change over the past 40 years involved changes to the tax code and financial regulation that allowed income and wealth to accumulate at the top of the distribution. Undoing those changes would not represent a large increase in government intervention.
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Citing sources isn’t the same as actually reading and understanding them.
I looked up some of their sources because some of the material in the video didn’t sound right, and wasn’t surprised to find that they’ve significantly misrepresented (or misunderstood) the sources in at least a couple of cases.
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No, the overall price level should remain the same. We are talking about the same number of dollars in the economy and the same total goods and services but distributed differently. There might be some price increase in some goods but it would be offset elsewhere by decreases in other goods.
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That may be the case but the basic point holds. Most people thing the wealth distribution should be flatter than they think it is and the actual wealth distribution is much more skewed than people realize.
Thanks, that helps – I was viewing along the lines of multiplying every dollar currently in the economy by 180%.
The theory behind taxing capital gains at a lower rate is that it helps enable the movement of capital to its best use, which benefits the economy as a whole. I’m not an economist, but from what I’ve read, there isn’t a clear answer as to whether this theory plays out in practice or not, so there may be a very good argument for eliminating the preferential taxation for capital gains. There’s certainly a good argument for eliminating capital gains treatment for carried interest.
Imagine if one fewer helicopter accessible ski resort was built and 100,000,000 more chocolate bars. Silly example, but that’s the idea.
Or, you know, imagine if twenty million more families didn’t have to think much about the price of fresh fruits or vegetables but the Koch brothers had half as much to spend on political advertising.
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Most people haven’t actually thought about it. In the study cited by the video, almost all respondents picked “estimated” and “ideal” wealth distributions that included a substantial chunk of wealth being allocated to the bottom 20%. And “wealth” was clearly defined as net worth (i.e., the amount by which a family’s assets exceed their debts, if any). That demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding for how our economy works.
I’d be surprised if there is any society on earth where personal debt is freely available and the bottom quintile has any net worth to speak of, because there will always be people who live hand to mouth and owe more than they have. And I’d be willing to bet that if you gave people the choice between living in a very unequal society where consumer credit was widely available vs. living in a much less unequal society where debt was illegal, a LOT more people (even many liberal-minded Rawlsian types like you and me) would pick the unequal society.
I’m not at all saying that inequality isn’t problematic or that our debt and consumption fueled economy is anything remotely close to ideal. The video doesn’t suck because I disagree with its point. It sucks because it misrepresents information and demonstrates its creators’ fundamental lack of understanding of reality. It propagandizes while purporting to educate.
How is America not currently a fascist state of capitalism, i.e. small minds controlling everything?
Please show me.
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It’s the lizardman constant:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
Why do people think socialism is bad? Ok the first time wasn’t good, right idea wrong people. Making the same as your boss wold be great and people find incentives to compete other then money.Social rank in society validation through awards and national appraisal. A doctor would still have an easier more safe job than a coal miner. Socialism is only bad for the extremely rich if you look at the chart life would be better for almost everybody then the 1%.Reacting a certain way to certain ideas is just part of the programing the simple to understand version isn’t the best version the system isn’t the problem the problem is that people don’t react they just adapt to the new conditions.
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Mind cut-and-pasting (or just reexplaining) your basic criticisms?
Sure.
For reference, here is a press release regarding the main study on which the first half of the video is based.
My number one complaint is the completely interchangeable use of wealth and income. Wealth and income are related, and disparity of each measure is problematic, but they’re NOT interchangeable (think speed vs. distance). The creators of the video are so careless (or perhaps clueless) about distinguishing the two that there are times during the video where I’m not sure whether the graph shown represents wealth or income.
Second, is the idiotic notion that it’s outrageous that the poorest people don’t have any wealth. At 3:55 the narrator speaks in a shocked tone about how “the poorest Americans don’t even register!” But until that point they’ve mainly been talking about wealth (usually measured as net worth, or assets minus debt), not income. There are millions of people in this country who have more debt than assets, and therefore have zero (or negative) wealth. While that might be surprising to people who have never thought about it before, once you think about it, your reaction should be, “Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” not “HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?!” The creators of the video either haven’t thought very hard about what they’re saying, or they don’t care.
Third, some of the information presented is actually wrong. The study on which the first half of the video is based asked two different questions about preferred wealth distributions. 92% of respondents answered part of the first question the same way. But in the video, they talk about 92% of respondents answering the second question the same way, which isn’t true.
There are other subtleties (I also have some serious complaints about the actual study on which the first half of the video is based), but these are my chief complaints about the video.
I’d love to see the creators do it over again with an economist helping them assemble the information into more consistent, correct information, and then checking their work. I think it could be just as powerful and far more informative.
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I looked up some of their sources because some of the material in the video didn’t sound right, and wasn’t surprised to find that they’ve significantly misrepresented (or misunderstood) the sources in at least a couple of cases.
Which cases and please do back yourself up with sources. If you honestly feel like the video can be more accurate, then let us know so we can peer-review your claims and contact the producer with your verified info so it can hopefully be edited.
Edit: I just saw your post above. It looks like you don’t like your own “perceptions” of things more than the facts they present.
For example you say:
the idiotic notion that it’s outrageous that the poorest people don’t have any wealth. At 3:55 the narrator speaks in a shocked tone about how “the poorest Americans don’t even register!”
You’re taking that statement far too literally. It’s an expression and it works, IMO. You’re focused on extremely trite details and you’re missing the forest for the trees.
I do suggest if you’re passionate about it, you do go ahead and make your own video on disparity. Especially considering you feel like the producers of the current video have idiotic notions.
My number one complaint is the completely interchangeable use of wealth and income. Wealth and income are related
Please explain how vital it is to unrelate wealth and income? You just complained that you got confused. Maybe it’s just you that’s too busy nitpicking to look at the bigger, disparity picture?
I also have some serious complaints about the actual study on which the first half of the video is based
That’s vague. If they’re serious complaints, I would think they’re worthy of mentioning specifically?
The study on which the first half of the video is based asked two different questions about preferred wealth distributions. 92% of respondents answered part of the first question the same way. But in the video, they talk about 92% of respondents answering the second question the same way, which isn’t true.
If that’s true, you should contact them.
When correcting make sure to account for the fact that most households that earn $50k or less now days have two bread winners to make even that amount whereas, households used to rely on a single bread winner. When you adjust for that fact, things are very dire indeed.
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four out of five people on the Forbes 500 list of the world’s wealthiest individuals got their wealth primarily from trading real estate.
And five out of five of those people were born on third base but think they hit a triple.
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Sigh… I was afraid of this. Instead of taking heed of the video’s overall message, people are being pedantic and focused on rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic instead of trying to help people to the lifeboats.
I wish people put more energy and effort into producing things themselves than being pedantic twats who only want to focus precious energy on taking down one another like rats on the ship. But, I guess that’s asking for too much. Being pedantic outweighs having perspective and solidarity. No wonder the rich wipe their asses with you.
Related…
http://www.businessinsider.com/wealth-and-income-inequality-in-america-2013-4
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I’m not sure what that means. They use wealth and income terminology completely interchangeably. Doing that in an ostensibly “informative” video about inequality is as fatal as making a visually lovely video about computers and talking about RAM and hard drive space as if they’re the same thing (an imperfect analogy for sure, but one that most Boingboing readers understand). Think about it. If somebody made a video about the history of personal computer capabilities, and displayed a single graph about “memory” with a voiceover that pointed to one region of the graph and talked about RAM, and pointed to another region of the very same graph and talked about hard drive space, would you trust anything else that video had to say?
The video producers have far better graphic design and video production skills than I could ever hope to have. Perhaps “idiotic” is a bit hyperbolic (ok, it’s very hyperbolic), but I seriously think they’re doing their cause a disservice, Glenn Beck style. Beck is a master of taking an issue that is a serious and (often) legitimate concern for some people, finding some piece of information to support his audience’s preconceived opinions, and then distorting it in some twisted way to make his audience think they’ve learned something really mild-blowing. It’s showmanship over substance. You can say I’m hung up on details (ok, I am). But as the product of a very “critical thinking” heavy education, when I see a presentation that has obvious facts wrong that everybody is praising as revelatory, I get pedantically annoyed.
[quote=“Cowicide, post:57, topic:12528”]
That’s vague. If they’re serious complaints, I would think they’re worthy of mentioning specifically?[/quote]
Unfortunately it’s hard to do concisely. But the 92% figure comes from a question in the study where respondents were given two pie graphs representing “wealth distribution” (after being told that wealth = net worth) and asked to pick which society they’d choose if they had no idea where they’d land on the pie graph. Unknown to them, one pie graph represented actual US wealth distribution and the other represented Swedish income (not wealth) distribution. 92% picked the second one.
In the press release for the study, the authors talk about how they used Swedish income distribution because Swedish wealth distribution didn’t differ as dramatically from US wealth distribution. They used the 92% figure to show that Republicans and Democrats alike agree that they want a more equal society, which is a very interesting point. But the way they wrote it up, they made it sound like everybody wants to live in Sweden, when they say themselves in the footnotes that Sweden isn’t dramatically different from the US when it comes to wealth (not income) distribution.
Read the press release linked above. It’s actually an interesting little study. But it’s bizarre when you think about what exactly people were asked to compare.
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