The birth of a new american aristocracy?
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Akka
Moody old mage.
No class that keep a disproportionate amount of wealth and keep it inside through generations is legitimate. A substancial part of the wealth imbalance should be blamed on them, though the biggest contenders (that could be called "criminal" considering the amount of wealth they keep clamped in their hands) are the 0,1 %.
Probably just as many that are not cut out for College.
I've done both. I was a carpenter and assistant plumber. And I've been a corporate stooge.
One took a lot of hard work where the task was usually quite satisfying, and the other sucks but the money is really good.
This was pretty much exactly the attitude the article was addressing. Sure, the imbalance is astronomically worse at the very top, but the top 10%-.1% have about 55% of the wealth in the US (yes, that is excluding the top .1%, no billionaires included). The idea is that they need to start taking some responsibility.
metalhead
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Could be. In the past we had good paying jobs with benefits and pensions for people who couldn't really make it in either setting. That's why it's imperative to get people into power who grew up after that world had mostly disappeared. Most people who grew up in that world don't seem to grasp that it doesn't exist any more. And many who do grasp that are now angry, because the ones who don't never did anything about it.
For the record, universities in the Netherlands (between #50-#200 worldwide) cost €7k to €10k per year in tuition for international students (EU is cheaper) and are quite easy to get in to. I'm always a bit amazed why there aren't more Americans here.
Anyway, I think most of the difference between the 10% and the lower classes happens prior to/independent of university admission. Primary and secondary education, health care access and police/justice reform are probably bigger items. America can use some reform in those anyway.
It would be good if the 90% turned out to vote more often.
CrazyScientist
Those crazy scientists...
The article is interesting, but is it possible that a false group is being created here by arbitrarily dividing the data into deciles, rather than some smaller unit? My understanding is that the wealth and income disparity between the 1% and everyone else is so large that the distinction between the next 9% and the everyone below them, while significant in its own right, is almost trivial by comparison. For example, one could imagine that the elastic band is so tight for the 1% that they mathematically drag the 2% through 9% into the same category as them, when maybe the life experience of those 2% through 9% folks is much more similar to the next rung down (still need to work for a living, etc.). I very much wonder what the IGEs would look like for groups of 1% instead of deciles. I suspect you'd find that the upper fraction of the so-called 9.9% is driving most of the distinction, but I admit I haven't looked at the data directly.
It's an important question because I think there is some danger inherent in the idea that folks like doctors and lawyers are the "elite", because they then make a very convenient target. The 1% can easily divert the ire of the bottom rungs towards the next 9%, so they give a pass to the real holders of wealth and power (the 1% or even 0.1%).
It's an important question because I think there is some danger inherent in the idea that folks like doctors and lawyers are the "elite", because they then make a very convenient target. The 1% can easily divert the ire of the bottom rungs towards the next 9%, so they give a pass to the real holders of wealth and power (the 1% or even 0.1%).
*Sigh* IQ is a better predictor of future success than parental socio-economic status is (Strenze, 2006). Yet we're supposed to have a serious discussion about this "intergenerational earnings elasticity", which could be wholly explained by genetics, while at the same time we're supposed to pretend that genes and intelligence aren't a thing
This is an important concern, but after some estimation using the numbers getting tossed around I don't think that is the case. The upper 1% is estimated to own 35-40% of the wealth. According to the numbers in the article linked by the OP, the 0.1% own around 20% of the wealth. Subtracting that leaves 15-20% of the wealth for the 0.99 - 0.999 group. There are 9 times as many people in that group as in the 0.999 - 1 group, so the average 0.1% member is roughly 10 times as wealthy as anybody from the rest of the 1%. The next 4% own something like 25-30% of the wealth, so I am estimating the 0.98 - 0.99 group to have something like 10% of the wealth, which means the average wealth is about half that of the 0.99 - 0.999 percent. So in my opinion it makes much sense to group these together and separate the 0.1% instead of making it an issue of the 1% vs the 99%.Now of course it is debatable where to draw the line - do you talk about the 9.9% or the 4.9 percent or the 14.9%? But no matter how exactly you do the grouping, you still end up with a group of people which own a large fraction of the wealth even if you subtract the top 0.1%.
Just like the high nobility of old needed the low nobility to keep the peasants in line, the 0.1% needs the 9.9% (or whatever second wealthiest group you want to make) to stabilize the system. Doctors and lawyers are not the elite elite, but still part of the elite that concentrates wealth. The 0.1% can only keep doing what they are doing, because there is still a decently large group of people who profit from the scheme - maybe not profit as much, but still profit. And this translates into an even larger group of people who still have (maybe false) hope that they might profit in the future.
metalhead
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The abstract of that paper says that IQ is not an overwhelmingly better predictor of success than parental socioeconomic status. Which means parental SES is still a pretty good predictor.
Also, without an examination of whether parental SES also correlates to performance on IQ tests, this data doesn't really support the conclusion you're going for.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
They're trying to associate themselves with the top 1%? "9.9%" gives them 0.9% of the top 1.
If you think that IQ is merely a residue of parental SES, then how come it's a BETTER predictor of future success than parental SES? As for IQ, it's obvious that it's highly heritable (or, put colloquially, genetic). What this means is that it is more likely that parental SES is the residue of high IQ, rather than the other way around. Intelligent people tend to do better in life, and in universities. They pass on their genes to their kids, who then will also tend to do better in life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ said:
Timsup2nothin
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They're trying to associate themselves with the top 1%? "9.9%" gives them 0.9% of the top 1.
Actually, it gives them all of the top 1%. It oddly excludes that tenth of a percent that just barely makes it into the top ten percent. Apparently, this "top 9.9% aristocracy" is not measuring themselves on their math skills.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
In article they specifically exclude the top 0.1% as of a different people. So maybe they are excluding the final tenth that is below the 90th which is kinda the idea right?
Timsup2nothin
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Ah. I suspected that somewhere in the details they clarified that, but they had to know that people were going to shorthand it with "top 9.9%." Not that they should be held accountable for what people are going to undoubtedly do, but still.
Drewcifer
Agent of Karma
Part of the problem in the US is that an increasing number of jobs require a college degree to get the job, but don't really require a college education to do the job well, they just require somebody of reasonable intelligence. This is is true of a lot of lower and mid level management positions in non-technical fields. The degree requirements were probably originally a way to sort candidates by intelligence, back when it was relatively inexpensive to go to college. Now that education is extremely expensive it sorts candidates by social class and disqualifies intelligent people who grew up in poorer and lower middle class households.
metalhead
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I think the point you're missing is that performance on an IQ test is a pretty poor measure of intelligence. Researchers estimate that IQ as measured by the test is only about half attributable to genetics. The other half is environmental - things like access to nutrition, early childhood education, social and economic stability, etc. etc. etc. all contribute to IQ test performance.
In other words, the SES of one's parent(s) or guardian(s) growing up has a large impact on how one performs on IQ tests. In fact it has as large an impact on test performance as actual genetic intelligence itself. So if you can't isolate the environment a person is raised in even from the tool which itself measures intelligence, you sure as hell can't say that genetic intelligence itself is in any way more predictive of lifetime achievement than parental SES.
civvver
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I agree to an extent, when you start discussing hugely distressed urban areas like cities of chicago and detroit where the public school systems are crap.
But it's not true for all. My suburb is fairly well off but there are still trailer parks and section 8 apartments and their kids go to the same schools as my kids and have the same opportunities. A lot of them do awesome at school. The problem is when they graduate they have no way to pay for college except for scholarships, financial assistance or tons of loans, and since their parents most likely didn't go to college they may not be pushing them to do so.
Anecdotal example. My grandparents were poor, my grandfather had a small farm, mostly raised cows. He wasn't one of those rich land owning farmers, more like a small family farm that barely keeps the bank off their bank (he didn't inherit his land). They lived extremely modestly, had 4 kids. In his later years he also worked nights as a janitor. This was like in the 40s and 50s. All the kids did fine in school, even being in a small rural town and my dad went to General Motors Institute which is now called Kettering. It's now extremely expensive to go to now, but back then it wasn't and they are a work study school. You go for a semester and then intern for a semester. You still graduate in 4 years because you go year round. He was able to finish college with no debt, and he married at 18 and my mom worked secretarial jobs to pay rent. He became an engineer, eventually moving into management and is quite successful.
The point is he came from a super low income family but was still able to get through college debt free. That would be borderline impossible now due to the cost and would limit everything you can do in the future. Had he been born 30 years later my guess is probably would've still gone to college but we would've lived in apartments my whole life probably and it would've been impossible for them to help me out with my education due to the cost. They would've never gotten ahead.
