The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

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jacob
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by jacob »

Another thing this thread reminded me off was the Gervais principle with losers, clueless, and sociopaths.

In that framework, the 9.9% are the clueless. Insofar you're a FI-loser, the Aristocratic-clueless should be encouraged to keep working to pay our dividends. That's kinda what Sclass suggested. In that framework, the 0.1% are ignored---in the sense they're more like an invisible force of nature. The 90% are also irrelevant as long as they don't revolt as per OP article.

Of course overall, in order to create a working system, it takes all three groups. If anyone of them stop cooperating, the system will change.

Stahlmann
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by Stahlmann »

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Last edited by Stahlmann on Mon Jul 02, 2018 4:40 am, edited 3 times in total.

jacob
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by jacob »

Yes, the English language is in dire need of a neutral/third person pronoun for these kinds of discussions.

"He" used to be acceptable/neutral, but now it results in immediate PC-trouble!

suomalainen
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by suomalainen »

One can always find an english equivalent of a gender-neutral "pronoun" if one is so inclined.

BRUTE
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by BRUTE »

Stahlmann wrote:
Sat May 19, 2018 4:08 pm
Invisible FistH^H^H^H^H Hand of The Market
...
and I'd have more energy to find better job :lol: :lol: :lol:
or maybe pressing 8 keys in emacs to change a 4 letter word is what exhausted Stahlmann so. there are real editors out there. same thing in vim is only 2 keys: cw

Campitor
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by Campitor »

As I got older, the holiday pomp of patriotic luncheons and bridge-playing rituals came to seem faintly ridiculous and even offensive, like an endless birthday party for people whose chief accomplishment in life was just showing up. I belonged to a new generation that believed in getting ahead through merit, and we defined merit in a straightforward way: test scores, grades, competitive résumé-stuffing, supremacy in board games and pickup basketball, and, of course, working for our keep. For me that meant taking on chores for the neighbors, punching the clock at a local fast-food restaurant, and collecting scholarships to get through college and graduate school. I came into many advantages by birth, but money was not among them.
Why does patriotism and bridge games offend the writer? This seems illogical. It appears there are deeper psychological issues behind his outrage. Could it be that as a young man he wasn't privy to all the hard work and sacrifices made by the targets of his moralizing? Perhaps he is jealous of the perceived ease other had while he toiled away at his chores?
The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.
He makes this allegation but provides zero facts to backup his claim. How exactly are the privileges being stolen for other people's children. I know a lot of educators who work in inner city schools. They are motivated and well credentials in their area of teaching. Without exception they lament the lack of parent engagement in their child's education and the child's lack of motivation for learning and their penchant for disrespecting authority. These difficult children, and parents, are the real thieves who monopolize a teacher's time and focus to the detriment of the other poor inner city kids who actually want to learn.
I’ve joined a new aristocracy now, even if we still call ourselves meritocratic winners. If you are a typical reader of The Atlantic, you may well be a member too. (And if you’re not a member, my hope is that you will find the story of this new class even more interesting—if also more alarming.) To be sure, there is a lot to admire about my new group, which I’ll call—for reasons you’ll soon see—the 9.9 percent. We’ve dropped the old dress codes, put our faith in facts, and are (somewhat) more varied in skin tone and ethnicity. People like me, who have waning memories of life in an earlier ruling caste, are the exception, not the rule.
Again where are the facts to backup his assertions? It's obvious by his choice of words (new aristocracy, caste, etc.) that he is highly biased.
Every piece of the pie picked up by the 0.1 percent, in relative terms, had to come from the people below. But not everyone in the 99.9 percent gave up a slice. Only those in the bottom 90 percent did. At their peak, in the mid-1980s, people in this group held 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Three decades later that had fallen 12 points—exactly as much as the wealth of the 0.1 percent rose."
So what could explain this? So what was happened between 1980 and today? Hmm... NAFTA, an acceleration in technology, and an increase in immigration (*Migration Policy Institute *Center for Immigration Studies). So pressure on wages resulting from an increase in immigration and the elimination of jobs to foreign countries or loss via new technology is the fault of the 9%? Per the US Census Bureau the biggest losses to income has been to the households without Bachelor's Degrees or above. The image below is some Census Data which I've cobbled together. The increase of GDP, population, and the explosion in technology throughout the years can account for the the wealth disparities when you add up the number of households without a bachelor's (or above) versus those with advanced degrees (masters or above); 77.9 million for the former versus 16.5 million for the latter.


Census Bureau Historical Income Tables *see H-13
:
Image

"Economists are prudent creatures, and they’ll look up from a graph like that and remind you that it shows only correlation, not causation. That’s a convenient hedge for those of us at the top because it keeps alive one of the founding myths of America’s meritocracy: that our success has nothing to do with other people’s failure."
So other people's failures and the subsequent loss of earning potential is the fault of the 9% for being successful? WTF? And what of the economist that would disagree with his premise? Would those economist be any less prudent? I could go on and on but what's the point? This article is so full of fail that I have to award it a full raspberry.

IlliniDave
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by IlliniDave »

jacob wrote:
Sat May 19, 2018 3:12 pm
(*) Those who have traveled to Europe (north and south) as well as the US might have noticed that you could plot people's height on the Gatsby curve as well. Average height is epigenetic and relates to how healthy and well-fed a country was two generations ago. You find the tallest people (on average) in Northern Europe.
I thought for people of European descent height was only 20% epigenetic (80% genetic)--forget where I read that. As tall as Swedes and Dutch are, the are essentially equaled by some of the groups in Sudan (Dinka, et. al)--not a place one would want to imitate economically or socially. Most states in the US make at least a token attempt to funnel resources to economically disadvantaged children, but it is something we can do better I believe.

It is an interesting dichotomy that the deepest blue voting often comes from places where poverty has its highest concentration, public schools are among the worst, and (speculating) Gini coefficients are among the highest. In a state we are both familiar with, Chicago public schools are not even in the top 600 school districts ... in Illinois, despite Cook ranking in/near the to ten counties in the state by per capita income (probably a high Gini thing). I don't think Cook County has voted red in my lifetime. The real wealth in Illinois is in the "swing counties" (in terms of how they vote, red or blue, for presidents) clustered around Chicago. There too are the best public school systems. Hence my anecdotal observation/unscientific belief that neither far right nor far left leads to the best results.

Maybe it is somewhat naive on my part, but it seems like in places with a very low Gini number, higher income mobility (which is presumably a relative thing) is a little bit of an illusion? Maybe that is where you were going with the important thing for many is simply how they compare to their neighbors?

ThisDinosaur
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by ThisDinosaur »

C40 wrote:
Fri May 18, 2018 2:31 pm
This seems like one of the most straightforward ways to help with inequality in the U.S. It's been spoken about for a long time, but I don't ever hear anyone talking about actually implementing it. I don't recall hearing/reading it on any politician's platforms ever (though I follow politics very little).

Does anyone here know - is there any real talk of this happening? It'd probably not be acceptable to make huge reductions for schools in nicer areas, so, would it be extremely expensive to, say, fund all schools as well as what is currently like the 80th percentile)
It's what they do in a few European countries. But think about how difficult the transition from our system to their system would be. The parents in the 9.9% will fight for the option to buy their kids an advantage.

And its not just expensive private schools to fix. The SAT is basically an IQ test. But one of the secrets of IQ tests is that you can study, practice, and get better at a particular test. You can spend a couple grand on SAT prep courses and get a better score, even though doing so won't make you any better at the things the score is supposed to be measuring.

If you standardized all schools, you wouldn't need standardized tests. Because 13 years of grades is a better proxy for how you'll do in college than one day of testing. So, the current system is favored by upwardly mobile people who donate to political campaigns.

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by Kriegsspiel »

C40 wrote:
Fri May 18, 2018 2:31 pm
ThisDinosaur wrote:
Fri May 18, 2018 11:43 am
... elimination of tuition-based private schools, the separation of public school funding from local property values...
This seems like one of the most straightforward ways to help with inequality in the U.S. It's been spoken about for a long time, but I don't ever hear anyone talking about actually implementing it. I don't recall hearing/reading it on any politician's platforms ever (though I follow politics very little).

Does anyone here know - is there any real talk of this happening? It'd probably not be acceptable to make huge reductions for schools in nicer areas, so, would it be extremely expensive to, say, fund all schools as well as what is currently like the 80th percentile)
If you both are talking about making it impossible for parents to put their kids in a private school, as in criminalization... that seems wrong.

I could definitely see forcibly distributing kids from disparate neighborhoods throughout the school systems decreasing inequality, because the smart/rich kids would do a lot worse with the disruptions caused by riots in the hallways, kids calling teachers faggots with no recourse (1), absences, apathetic school officials (2, 3) etc etc. I think it was in Our Kids, by Putnam (the guy who wrote Bowling Alone) that he talked about how even in public schools, the honors kids were segregated from the commoners so that they could learn.

1. https://www.city-journal.org/html/no-th ... 14951.html
2. http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/12/hi ... ion-rates/
3. Our Kids section on Santa Ana

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by jennypenny »

While philosophically it might sound like a good idea, there are practical considerations that would make life much more difficult for parents. When kids go to the local elementary school, it means they become friends with local kids, making play dates much easier. It also makes group projects easier to organize (very common in schools now) and carpooling possible. Most parents work so having neighborhood families that can pool their resources to manage snow days, days off, extracurricular activities, etc, makes life so much easier. It also means being able to walk to school or at least spend a lot less time on a bus.

edited to add: My kids went/go to a private high school. Many of the parents sent their kids to that high school because it was near their job (it's close to big pharma row near Princeton) which was much more convenient than sending them to their local public high school. It meant they could drop off/pick up, attend sporting and other events, and be near by if someone got sick. The high school also offers staffed supervision and an open cafeteria from 7am to 10pm most days, so if kids need to spend extra time at school because parents are working late/early, they are well cared for. (Just FYI so people can see another side of why people choose private schools sometimes.)

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by BRUTE »

"play dates"

brute doesn't envy human kids these days

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by CECTPA »

Campitor wrote:
Sat May 19, 2018 10:40 pm
So other people's failures and the subsequent loss of earning potential is the fault of the 9% for being successful? WTF?
All the troubles they are getting into (debt, poor health, legal problems etc.) becomes a source of income for the 9% (doctors, lawyers, social workers, people who are involved into creating all kinds of entertainment for the 90%). That's how I understood his premise.

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by Campitor »

CECTPA wrote:
Sun May 20, 2018 12:48 pm
All the troubles they are getting into (debt, poor health, legal problems etc.) becomes a source of income for the 9% (doctors, lawyers, social workers, people who are involved into creating all kinds of entertainment for the 90%). That's how I understood his premise.
People need to be paid for the services they render. The slope to being a money lender, healthcare professional, or lawyer is neither cheap or of small duration. Debt can be avoided by living a sufficiently frugal life within the scope of one's wages. And legal problems also have a sufficient probability of avoidance via good judgement. Health is the only thing that can be outside of one's control (contagion, etc,). But regardless, everyone is happy to have the services of the money lenders, doctors, and lawyers when a crisis arises.

What does the author propose the money lenders, lawyers, and doctors do? Give out free loans or work for no pay or at cost? How many people would take these stressful jobs if they paid next to nothing? The guy who wrote the article is just another promoter of class warfare who wants to punish people for desiring to get paid for their services, for making better choices, and working harder.

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by CECTPA »

Campitor wrote:
Sun May 20, 2018 8:06 pm
What does the author propose the money lenders, lawyers, and doctors do?
Oh, I was trying to have a conversation based on the premise that you read the article given by the topic starter, as you would know that the author is not suggesting any solutions. This is just a subjective sociopolitical analysis, an elaborate opinion on what is going on. And I did not even express my agreement or disagreement, so maybe I'm not the best person to speak for the author when questions like yours arise. You trying to dissect the ethics of it, but I don't think there is a need.

I'm actually in healthcare, quite well paid managerial position, my husband has a well paid job in IT and we are both immigrants. Our house will be 100 % paid for in January. Before coming to Canada we did not have a lot of education under our belts and we were quite poor. So we have an experience of going from ZERO to where we are, so we would have the right to ask poor and marginalised Canadians, like some of my patients "Why the hell you're still can't figure out your life? You have English as first language, and you were born in a country where people are not deprived of human rights"
But since I had a lot of sociology in Nursing school, I know that this is not that simple, there's a lot more context come into play. So I found the article quite interesting, although I can't really critique it because I'm not an expert.

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by BRUTE »

CECTPA wrote:
Sun May 20, 2018 12:48 pm
All the troubles they are getting into (debt, poor health, legal problems etc.) becomes a source of income for the 9% (doctors, lawyers, social workers, people who are involved into creating all kinds of entertainment for the 90%).
brute sees this from the libertarian point of view: services rendered by the 9% (or the 0.1% for that matter) are only immoral or problematic if they consist of rent-seeking instead of voluntary exchange of goods and services. lobbying to block entry into a profession: bad. performing a service and charging money for it that the consumer pays voluntarily: good.

some humans get hung up on the voluntariness of consuming health care services. brute is very libertarian on this. humans also require water and food for survival, yet going to the grocery store seems pretty voluntary for most humans most of the time.

Campitor
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by Campitor »

CECTPA wrote:
Sun May 20, 2018 10:22 pm
Campitor wrote:
Sun May 20, 2018 8:06 pm
What does the author propose the money lenders, lawyers, and doctors do?
Oh, I was trying to have a conversation based on the premise that you read the article given by the topic starter, as you would know that the author is not suggesting any solutions. This is just a subjective sociopolitical analysis, an elaborate opinion on what is going on. And I did not even express my agreement or disagreement, so maybe I'm not the best person to speak for the author when questions like yours arise. You trying to dissect the ethics of it, but I don't think there is a need.
I did read the article in its entirety. The ethics implied in the article do need to be dissected because what he’s preaching is equality of outcome which can only be achieved via a form of tyranny so potent that it would wreck society and banish the successful and educated dissenters to the gulags. Like you I’m also an immigrant, was poor, and English wasn’t my native tongue. And I didn’t think you we’re defending him ; you were just clarifying.

I felt compelled to post on how idiotic his train of thought was and how such thinking (blaming others for one’s bad choices) can lead to loss of vital services. ;)

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Would the family featured in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" be considered part of the aspirational class?

Once any woman learns to read, how might that skill subsequently be lost along her maternal line of descendants? Would the same rule of thumb apply to programming a computer?

ThisDinosaur
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by ThisDinosaur »

BRUTE wrote:
Sun May 20, 2018 11:14 pm
brute sees this from the libertarian point of view: services rendered by the 9% (or the 0.1% for that matter) are only immoral or problematic if they consist of rent-seeking instead of voluntary exchange of goods and services. lobbying to block entry into a profession: bad. performing a service and charging money for it that the consumer pays voluntarily: good.
What is the ethical difference between rent-seeking lobbyists buying benefit for themselves and yuppies buying a path to success for their kids? At the expense of poorer kids?

@Campitor & CECTPA, no solutions were offered, but I thought the article seemed to imply that more class warfare was a solution. He also seemed to be seeking penance for his family's history of privilege.

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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by jacob »

Speaking in terms of averages (the mean of the distribution) again.

It's also been noted (by Stanley in Millionaire Next Door) that first-generation immigrants have an edge over natives and usually end up better off than the natives. I don't know/recall what the exact explanation was but I can think of three.

First, immigrants might have more of an X-factor in the sense of entrepreneurial spirit or risk-taking. After all, it takes something special to move your life from one country to another country as opposed to staying at home in the valley you grew up in. This effect is lost in the second-generation---probably because it has a lot to do with personality-type.

Second, it might be that only the better off (socioeconomic, educational strength, IQ, ...) are capable of successfully getting out of their former country. Successful refugees probably don't comes from the poorest layers of society but rather the layers with more resources. This advantage is lost eventually. "They say" that wealth is made by the first, held by the second, and lost by the third generation. This goes for everybody.

Three, immigrants tend to bring their consumer habits with them so moving to a higher earning/spending country will typically lead to higher savings rates because the immigrant family has not yet learned the consumer habits that allow them to blow all their money. I've seen this over and over. When I grew up, the natives were bitching about how certain refuges drove around on brand new bicycles while on government support. Later I learned how/why? They were getting more support than anyone else. They just spent it more wisely. I've never done/seen the survey, but I bet the concentration of immigrants in the personal finance sphere is higher than the native-born. ERE is immigrant. MMM is immigrant. Of the couples I've met over the years via ERE meetups and visits, a significant fraction was 50% immigrant. This advantage is also lost on average over subsequent generations.

As for taking credit, one should be careful about attribution error, that is, the tendency to associate success success with one's own deliberate skill, talent, ... and failure with society, random luck, ...

All three factors above can play a role at the same time for individuals. The statistical combinations determine what happens to the mean distribution though.

However, looking at my example or myself as representative/explanatory is a clear instance of selection bias. As an individual, it's not hard to imagine how I would not have been able to "solve" for my version of the American Dream (in 5 years :-P ). Had I not been born with a talent for sitting on my ass for 12+ hour days while staring at complex equations. Had I not been born into a stable/supportive family---but instead an abusive or sick family where I would have needed to find a job asap to support a family member(*)---I would never have been able to develop that talent into educational credentials (phd) because I would have been too busy helping out/doing damage control. Without the phd I would never have been able to work in the US.

I would of course say I worked hard for what I have. Others might say I was lucky. It's impossible to rerun the experiment exactly. I can only argue that I would probably have done well on different paths as well.

(*) This is where culture and regulations play different roles depending on what they are. If the responsibility for such a situation fell on the individual+family, like in the US, that talent would have been wasted.

Campitor
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Re: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy

Post by Campitor »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Mon May 21, 2018 6:51 am
What is the ethical difference between rent-seeking lobbyists buying benefit for themselves and yuppies buying a path to success for their kids? At the expense of poorer kids?

@Campitor & CECTPA, no solutions were offered, but I thought the article seemed to imply that more class warfare was a solution. He also seemed to be seeking penance for his family's history of privilege.
The ethical difference is a lobbyist is circumventing the free market by buying privilege - the lobbyist is essentially paying to get a monopoly. Yuppies purchasing services to benefit their children is not the same thing ethically nor violates free market principles. And although he didn't offer solutions, it's obvious from his choice of words that he is implying and advocating for equality of outcome which as I've stated earlier can only be achieved by a tyranny so vast and absolute that we would cease being a democratic republic.

The author is free to do penance by any means he desires, the problem is that he would force everyone else to follow his chosen path of penance (forced redistribution of income and equality of outcome).

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