Plus... There are thousands of people that work for those companies and other companies that are multi-millionaires because the innovation of a few.
Drawing comparisons between 20th century America and societies where large numbers of people are starving to death is disingenuous. The average middle class American is better off today than 5 years ago. That Bill Gates or Warren Buffett has improved their situation to a greater degree does not affect that. When the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer, that is bad. When everyone is beating inflation, but the rich are doing it better, I don't think the same problems will result. Maybe I am weird or something, but I don't care what other people make. I care what I can buy.
Why is it disingenous? It's a simple fact that income is becoming ever more unevenly distributed, and it's a fact that mobility is decreasing. It's also a fact that countries that exhibit this characteristics tend to be more unstable ones. These are all facts. Anyway, you have made ir clear numerous times that you are perfectly happy and exhibit a stoic resolve in the face of income inequality. That is nice, but there is a substantial amount of academic research indicating that your view is distinctly against the grain and that most human beings react differently.
It's true among men. The women's lib movement has masked the overall downward trend. I think the SSRN put out a paper on this some time ago. EDIT: Link here. Interesting paper.
Looks like you are just seeing what you want to see then because the evidence has pointed this way for awhile. http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4174181 [M]ore and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much "stickier" than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter. The Economic Policy Institute also argues that social mobility has declined since the 1970s. In the 1990s 36% of those who started in the second-poorest 20% stayed put, compared with 28% in the 1970s and 32% in the 1980s. In the 1970s 12% of the population moved from the bottom fifth to either the fourth or the top fifth. In the 1980s and 1990s the figures shrank to below 11% for both decades. The figure for those who stayed in the top fifth increased slightly but steadily over the three decades, reinforcing the sense of diminished social mobility. Not all social scientists accept the conclusion that mobility is declining. Gary Solon, of the University of Michigan, argues that there is no evidence of any change in social-mobility rates, down or up. But, at the least, most people agree that the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in social mobility. Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations. He found that 42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth. Upward mobility was particularly low for black families. On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth. Jonathan Fisher and David Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of Labour Statistics, looked at inequality and social mobility using measures of both income and consumption. They found that mobility "slightly decreased" in the 1990s. In 1984-90, 56% and 54% of households changed their rankings in terms of income and consumption respectively. In 1994-99, only 52% and 49% changed their rankings. Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysed family incomes over three decades. They found that 40% of families remained stuck in the same income bracket in the 1990s, compared with 37% of families in the 1980s and 36% in the 1970s. Aaron Bernstein of Business Week points out that, even though the 1990s boom lifted pay rates for low-earners, it did not help them to get better jobs. even Bush apologist David Brooks has acknowledged this: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/opinion/25brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Rhadamantheus also brings up an important point related to women wage earners which deflates the myth that Americans are better off simply because household incomes are up - american middle class incomes are up, but then so are hours worked.
upward mobility is deterred for the bottom 20% not because of lack of opportunities, but because the benefits are too good at the bottom and the loss of benefits is too great as you try to move up. subsidised health care, subsidised food, subsidised shelter, subsidised college education for kids, incometax credit, etc... When you try to work your way up, you will actually taxed at higher than 50%. You lose subsidised health care, subsidised food, subsidised shelter, subsidised college education for kids, start paying income tax. The benefits that many try to obtain for the lower 20% actually hurts them that much more in the long run. Why do you think so many people/seniors will only earn $15K then stop working for the year?
the benefits are too good at the bottom? You've lost your mind, and/or never been at the bottom. It's quite a stretch to call living in a govt. housing project, on eating based off of food stamps real benefits. To assume people are on the bottom of the socio-economic scale because life is just too good down there for them to want to move up, shows a real lack of understanding as to what it's like.
I don't think he meant good in the sense that they love their life, but rather that many people in that socio-economic level have some benefits to them that they lose if they start to move up. I have clients who don't want to earn salary over X dollars because they don't want to lose their gov. housing, gov. medical insurance, etc.
The problem is that we are not talking about the bottom 20%. What about the middle 40-50%? Health care cost is raising much faster than inflation, same goes for education cost, one major health problem could ruin a middle class family. The middle class have not really have enjoyed improved living standard for a long period, that is the biggest problem. You will always have the Gates and Jobs type people at the top, that is not the problem. However, most people by defination will not make it to the top 1%, a nation with a prosperous middle class is better off than one where the middle class is not enjoying the benefits of productivity gains through due to technologies and other improvements. Middle class is the foundation of a successful democracy, not the top 1% or top 10% even.
With all due respect, this is just nuts. You should try living in their shoes for a year and see just how you like it. Geez! (insert "roll-eyes" here) Impeach Bush for Creating Idiots!
It's disingenuous because the reason income disparity is "not a healthy societal characteristic" is because in those societies where it occurs, the ever increasing group of people who are not at the top are becoming so poor that revolution including possibly being killed is more palatable than continuing on the present course. When the people on the bottom are still living reasonably high on the hog, they are not going to revolt because Paul Allen's investment returns have dwarfed their paychecks. How many local rebellions have you seen in the US recently, even on a scale as small as a single city being overthrown. The closest we come in America is when there is some sort of breakdown in society that generally follows a disaster (see New Orleans). As long as the poor aren't getting poorer, I don't see the validity of comparing the US to revolutionary France or the like.
So you are saying that money and power can be infinitely aggreagated at the top of the scale at an increasing rate, so long as there are minor, incremental increases at the bottom, and a society will still function appropriately?, and that no matter how close we come to the income stratification level of Brazil or Mexico - the attending social problems will not come, because they just won't? A well thought out plan. And well supported with empircal evidence. I haven't done the math, but I am willing to bet that real wages in Mexico and Brazil have increased over the last few decades as well. However that does not seem to have placated the masses to the extne implied by your hypothesis Though I guess you don't need much emprical evidence in any event. Since you have defined down expectations by making the prevention armed rebellion the baseline, and I guess the only thing that perturbs you from your stoic lot in life, I guess you don't have the same value for a functional meaningful democracy that I do, or that Warren Buffet himself does, who you invoked as the benign archetype dispenser of the gospel of wealth.
I think you missed sam's point. If you lower your criteria for poor enough, of course America looks better. Heck, you could use that argument to say that mexico is better than some asian nations. But it's kind of sad that you'd have to stoop to holding out for "american fruit pickers in mexico" in order to justify the apparently glamorous lifestyle of America's destitute. At least, in my opinion.
Have you lived in their shoes? I have. I know the mentalily of the people that are in those shoes. I chose not to never receive any of the government handouts and got myself out of those shoes.
About the same time somebody in Europe asks to get paid in $$ rather than €€. Of course neither of those two things is really relevant at all, so let me know when you sneak back to D&D with a real response, m'kay? or don't.
I didn't lower my criteria for poor at all, that was Sam. I was never comparing Americans to the poor of other countries, and in fact was chastising Sam for doing exactly that. I said that I didn't foresee the problems typically associated with stratification of wealth occurring here, because most of the people in America are living good lives, and have no reason to cause those problems. Sam is the one who drew comparisons to Brazil and Mexico, not me. My fruit picking comment was meant to be ludicrous, to show that Brazil and Mexico are not apt comparisons for the US. The countries where major problems occur from the stratification of wealth are the countries with a great many very poor people. I have yet to see one example provided of a country with most people living very comfortably provided by anyone to show that America is in for the same problems because a few thousand people have huge sums of money. Sam is throwing out Brazil and Mexico to try to reframe the argument, and you bought it. Did it bother you that much that I didn't have regular internet access for a little while? That's kinda sweet.
