There is one misleading aspect to this visualisation: the rightmost bar for the ultrawealthy should get much, much narrower as it goes up (essentially microscopic on the x-axis scale). This matters because for the main part the area under the curve represents the total wealth in the country but when you start scrolling up the area is massively more than the wealth it is representing.
cyanydeez
if you did a population density on the xaxis, that's what you're talking about really. That would definitely be scarier.
hyperhello
How does the graph data calculate wealth in case of assets such as a mortgage, 401k, credit card, etc?
4BynHmBFUxBD
Tax wealth not work.
free_bip
A convincing argument.
chownie
I feel that modern society has grown just about enough to mostly stop blaming the impoverished for their own poverty, but the zeitgeist in the US has still not grown that much beyond the red scare. None of the possible solutions to the US's relentless financial punishment regime will be accepted fast enough for the people suffering now to benefit from them.
ETA: That this post is ostensibly in our (our = the highly capitalist website frequented by highly capitalist engineers and businessmen) ballpark and has gone three hours without much comment is pretty stark.
Double ETA: Downvoted within a minute of making that edit, so we're all reading it but having nothing to say? :) I'm glad at least there's proof someone on HN aside from me maybe read the linked article.
against_epistem
Most HN users are (I presume) well off people with comfy jobs and good savings. It's very hard for some people to cope with the idea that in economic success most/lots/much is due to luck: natural abilities, where one was born, when/how/why one enters the market, what disasters/opportunities befall them etc. It's not easy to admit that maybe the positions we have in life are actually not justified after all.
SaucyWrong
Just reading now, but sure, I’ll risk the downvotes.
I agree that the American societal zeitgeist has certainly not evolved to a point where we acknowledge luck as a major factor in personal success.
Personal success is attributed to the talent and persistence of the individual.
Personal failures are attributed to character flaws of the individual.
In the US we lionize billionaires because we believe if we are smart enough and work hard enough we could become one. We spare no thought for the role of luck in the rise of a billionaire.
But if we work hard and don’t become a billionaire, best believe it’s somebody else’s fault.
SaucyWrong
We have a very individualistic attitude, except when it comes to our own failure, where we are too quick to pass blame to someone else.
The person who wrote this is themself a rich person. But of course they would never give up their own money.
So to generalise their policy, it is:
if(theirMoney > myMoney) {stealMoney()}
The problem is, you’ll very quickly run out of money to steal. A billion dollars over an entire country is a few dollars each. And you’ve just shot a billionaire in their house in order to get that tiny amount of money. You’re going to have to run extermination camps just to milk out enough for people to buy a new car. And then what do you do next year? You’ve already liquidated everyone. Everyone has spent their money. Now they want more. Expand the programme? Liquidate the doctors?
chownie
I think the problem is actually 100% the reverse of what you've come up with, the ultra-rich are stealing from the poor essentially all the time. It never stops, there's never really that much pushback and it leads to in the millions of deaths a year. Look up the DOGE cuts for a really obvious, simple, not really arguable example of this.
This is why societies across the world but particularly hyper-capitalist societies are all suffering a similar set of ills.
tomstuart
> The person who wrote this is themself a rich person. But of course they would never give up their own money.
You're extrapolating quite a bit, I think. There is a pretty wide range of policy decisions between the status quo and 'kill everyone with some wealth' in terms of dealing with the negative consequences of extreme wealth inequality.
(I do agree that there is a tendency to overestimate just how much wealth is available, though. People often get the idea that if there were no billionaires that everyone would be comfortably well off, and the maths doesn't quite check out on that, though you could probably improve the lives of a lot of people at the lower end of the spectrum. There's also a tendency to over-estimate what being in the 1% of wealth gets you: this is rich, for sure, but it's not 'private jet and luxury yacht' wealth by a long way)
guitarlimeo
I think rich people are good for the society, but ultrarich are a symptom of a broken system. The scale is absurd, no man should have that amount of wealth.
ETA: That this post is ostensibly in our (our = the highly capitalist website frequented by highly capitalist engineers and businessmen) ballpark and has gone three hours without much comment is pretty stark.
Double ETA: Downvoted within a minute of making that edit, so we're all reading it but having nothing to say? :) I'm glad at least there's proof someone on HN aside from me maybe read the linked article.
I agree that the American societal zeitgeist has certainly not evolved to a point where we acknowledge luck as a major factor in personal success.
Personal success is attributed to the talent and persistence of the individual.
Personal failures are attributed to character flaws of the individual.
In the US we lionize billionaires because we believe if we are smart enough and work hard enough we could become one. We spare no thought for the role of luck in the rise of a billionaire.
But if we work hard and don’t become a billionaire, best believe it’s somebody else’s fault.
Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50270764
So to generalise their policy, it is: if(theirMoney > myMoney) {stealMoney()}
The problem is, you’ll very quickly run out of money to steal. A billion dollars over an entire country is a few dollars each. And you’ve just shot a billionaire in their house in order to get that tiny amount of money. You’re going to have to run extermination camps just to milk out enough for people to buy a new car. And then what do you do next year? You’ve already liquidated everyone. Everyone has spent their money. Now they want more. Expand the programme? Liquidate the doctors?
This is why societies across the world but particularly hyper-capitalist societies are all suffering a similar set of ills.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/
(I do agree that there is a tendency to overestimate just how much wealth is available, though. People often get the idea that if there were no billionaires that everyone would be comfortably well off, and the maths doesn't quite check out on that, though you could probably improve the lives of a lot of people at the lower end of the spectrum. There's also a tendency to over-estimate what being in the 1% of wealth gets you: this is rich, for sure, but it's not 'private jet and luxury yacht' wealth by a long way)