The Data Behind Wealth Inequality in America | Average vs. Median Wealth
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- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- What is wealth inequality? How do we understand the concept of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer? In this video, I explain how you should be thinking about the change in average and median (or middle) wealth of people over time. I use real data about the last 30 years of American wealth to explain how economic inequality is ballooning.
I do this all without ever using any fancy jargon or any complex math. I focus on intuition and and insights to help you get an intuitive understanding of complex, important, and timely topics in statistics, data science, and data analytics.
Learn more about who I am and why I'm doing this here: • Data Demystified - Who...
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What a GREAT explainer video! I was a math major in college, so I've known this stuff cold for a long time. But so many don't know this really important math stuff. I've seen so many examples of journalism data is presented as "average" or even where it is just implied as "typical" data, which is not even clearly specified as whether it is "average" or "median." You are doing a GREAT service.
A very clear and easily understood video. I’ve always felt that many people think that average and median are interchangeable. I think history has shown us that societies that have such disparities, either of wealth or power, are doomed to eventual failure. I suspect it won’t sit well with the trickle down/job creators crowd either. If the wealth gap continue at the current rates what will it be like 2052, just asking for my grandkids as I’ll probably be gone by then!
Thanks for the kind words and I agree completely. As a parent I question these things daily.
I am sharing this because many people, even with Bachelors and Masters degrees, have forgotten the basic numeracy principles.
Thank you Catherine!!
Whats your name laterine
In hindi its mean potty
😂😂😂
Hey, I just wanted to say, don’t quit doing these. Like all great achievements there is a large up front investment of time and energy, and then with persistence, there will be a snow ball effect. There may be a point where you feel like the channel isn’t growing, and it’s not worth it. Don’t give up! I love this channel. Have you thought about making your own election model? An I idea I thought of was maybe making short versions of this for other medium like TikTok? That could get you tons of exposure, if you can make them fun and interesting. Especially if they are showing interesting perspectives on current data that are relevant culturally. Anyway, good luck!
Keith, thank you so much for your encouragement. You're right that sometimes it's hard to not get as much of a response to these videos as I'd like, but I agree that sticking to it is the key. I have every plan to continue and even expand the content (more on that in the next couple of months!). I like the idea of shorter form videos as well...though not being on much social media at all (by choice...I can't stand Facebook and the like), that's harder...though not impossible. Thank you again!
A few more stats to compliment this video:
PERCENT INCREASE IN WEALTH:
Bracket 1: Can't calculate (since they started with zero - but they definitely went down)
Bracket 2: 25% Increase
Bracket 3: No increase
Bracket 4: 2% increase
Bracket 5 (median): 11.5% increase
Bracket 6: 18% increase
Bracket 7: 28% increase
Bracket 8: 42% increase
Bracket 9: 73% increase
So, in general, the rich got richer, but it is worth noting that the second lowest bracket's wealth increased almost to the same extent as the 3rd richest bracket.
The second stat to look at is to compare these brackets using a logarithmic scale (ruclips.net/video/xgYalAy8oeg/видео.html) which is often used to compare sets of numbers that are not so close together. Using that scale -- here are the stats for both 1989 AND 2016:
Bracket 1: Can't calculate
Bracket 2: 3.6 --> 3.7
Bracket 3: 4.3 --> 4.3
Bracket 4: 4,7 --> 4.7
Bracket 5 (median): 4.9 --> 5
Bracket 6: 5.2 --> 5.2
Bracket 7: 5.3 --> 5.5
Bracket 8: 5.6 --> 5.7
Bracket 9: 5.8 --> 6.1
On a logarithmic scale, there is not massive difference between the brackets and the increases are not as dramatic.
The question, therefore, is which scale or means of analysis to use. Personally speaking, I think both are needed.
On the one hand, in absolute terms -- the poor did NOT do very well (with the exception of bracket #2). That is an issue. It's one thing if ALL brackets increase, but some more than others. But that is generally not the case, the poor are for the most part being left behind (again, with the notable exception of bracket #2).
Also, I think that having too much concentration of financial wealth in the hands of a small minority of the population can be dangerous -- and these stats indicate that we are at the very least moving more in that direction.
On the other hand, the logarithmic scale shows us that the disparity in wealth does not seem to be that great overall. It would be interesting to compare this to other countries (i.e., on a logarithmic scale). As such, while changes need to be made (in particular to help the poor and address the disproportionate increase of bracket #9 and perhaps bracket #8), we see that the issue may not be as drastic as the linear scale suggests.
Good 👍 simple analogies. I am glad 😊 you clarify median versus average.
Happy to help!
You truly deserve more subscribers
Are these figures adjusted for inflation?
Yes
I alway look for median wage, median income, but it is hard to get those figures. In Italy, for example, only average figures are available for the aforementioned indicators. In the Netherlands, this information is available. A very important and overlooked indicator is the median value of a house. To be compared to the median income of the family who lives in that house. In the Netherlands, this ratio is very high. Indeed, Dutch families are heavily indebted.
Data availability is a real issue in many domains. Best case, you get both!
@@DataDemystified pu reserch usa and varius more data say note 350 lac usd note 7lac usd its less i read 6 year ago and practically u right about everage and median its problems everywhere araund the world be cz fundamentally economic system democracy socialism capitalism comunism politics et all are note perfect its made by rich for themself note for everage population another can't happen this thing in this world all is wrong way making and applying by power force
I agree it's hard to get REAL numbers. How many people in an EXACT # make $40,000 in America? I have to see how many make $20,000 to $100,000 and subtract the PERCENTAGE (Ex. 30%) from the population of Ex. 350,000,000 and get 105,000,000 people.
Percentages are good, but would also like concrete #'s. Also yes Medians rather than Averages are needed.
Learned about this is Statistics. Median is WAY BETTER for calculating numbers realistically. Good video. 👍
I want to see this graph, the median not the mean, overlaid with a graph of the cost of childcare, groceries and gas as well as housing costs like rent
Great video! Does this account for inflation? If not the rich have stayed about the same from 2989 to 2016 and the poor have about half the wealth they used to.
Yup. This accounts for inflation!
This is misleading, the top 10% is far removed from the top 1000. If you had say the top 0.1% they wouls have had their wealth 10 fold
I love how objectively you described the data, leaving more subjective interpretations of the data up to the viewer. The facts are by in far the most important thing to nail down, first and foremost, before any further investigation is conducted.
Thanks!
Great. We now know the difference between average and typical but dont know anything else about the wealth gap.
Thank you for explaining that, it makes sense much more sense with you explaining the difference between the two. I'm still skeptical that it is a bad thing or that it should be regulated but I'm much more informed, thank you!
Such an informative video. The graph is bringing home the reality, that majority of Americans have been working for almost 3 decades, but did not have the ability to keep any of it to increase their wealth.
Thank you. Sadly, you're absolutely right.
I will use lot of graphs in this video, goes on to just explain diffence between average and median ....lol
Very informative, continue to learn 7 years after taking your class at CMU....
Glad to keep your education going!
Dude. This is really interesting
Thanks!
Great job making this distinction between “average” and “typical”.
I sense you’re trying to avoid overt politics but one of the things that continuously burned me over the 2017 Tax Cut was a certain party’s insistence that it will save the “average family” $4,000 - when if you understood numbers you knew was an insidious kleptocratic lie.
The whole truth was that all cuts (mostly to Capital Gains and large Corps), averaged over all ~120MM households would be the $4,000 “average” they were citing. And that doesn’t even account for areas taxes were raised, albeit to a lesser extent, on mostly upper-middle-level wage earners in Blue States or on imported goods, ultimately paid by American consumers.
‘Lying with Averages’ is a political theme that needs much greater coverage generally.
@@Brian-dh9lp that’s not the point of my comment.
I understand this trend really started post-Goldwater, with Nixon, but I’m talking about the rhetorical trick of lying with different forms of “average”-which is very shameless and sinister and was refreshingly touched on in this video.
What an incredible video! I was looking for an in depth statistical analysis of the ideas of wealth/income inequality, and luckily you posted! Awesome job :)
Thank you and glad you like it!
Please do a more recent one please maybe focus on pre and post pandemic.
thank you
Wow, many thanks Great Sir! There is a video from years back called wealth Inequality in America that includes the top 1% and 0.1%. Please update your video to include this bracket and to 2022.
Also can do something related to tax Inequality. The person who makes 10k a year pays 10%. And the person makes over some 500k to billions pay 37%. This is adding insult to the injury of income and wealth Inequality. Also please do a video on voting participation and voter suppression. All our problems eventually are related to citizen ignorance and apathy. Education of citizens is our authentic way to solve problems to win the right way.
I appreciate this video sooo much. It literally bridges the gaps that can create misunderstanding and bring clarity to the topic. 1000% liked and subscribed!
Happy to help and welcome!
I really appreciate your breakdown. Would you mind sharing your graphics?
Good job, but it neglects the downside of having poor wealth distribution.
I do not like the terminology used when you say wealth being distributed. Wealth is not distributed it is earned and increases when invested properly.
At 7:50, is the average and medium inflation adjusted numbers? Are they real numbers?
I am here from reddit! This is a fabulous content. I really like the “I am gonna zoom here, so you can get better...” it shows you want these videos to be perfect in a way.
Thank you!
Also, is there any dataset you used for making these graphs? I thought maybe I can calculate the rate at which bottom 10% are losing money per year and top 10% are earning per year...I am not sure but maybe this will give some insight.
All the data are from the US bureau of labor and statistics. Freely available to anyone!
Data Demystified Thanks 🙏
Starting at about 9:00 with the average wealth per household at $346k and ten buckets ranging from 0 to 686k, shouldn't the average over all the households be 346k? I get 155.8k. I may misunderstand something, but this was true for the previous examples. WTF?
Adjusted for inflation I presume?
Yes!
I know people glorify Reagan...& I can see why but doesn’t anyone else make a direct connection with wealth inequality? Deregulation which I wouldn’t think is a bad thing. What it got twisted into is bad...it got twisted into corporate interests buying legislation because deregulation-regulation is just rules..the government is still there. It’s become legal to be corrupt these days. Since we live in the “great” America could we have an economy where everyone owns a piece of capital? Is that not doable?
HI Kayla. Thanks for the comment. I tend to agree with you. Trickle-down-economics in general was a lie sold to the public that has no empirical support to it. Raegan certainly had his hand in that.
If we are going to think about what wealth inequality ACTUALLY means, don’t we need to divide the buckets by age cohorts? Of course, that explains a lot of the problem and ruins the click bait and eat the rich rage, but it’s still the right thing to do.
I was negative wealth in 1989, and now I’m off the other end of your chart. The median for my age group is in the 80% of the population! Yeah. TRUTH. I have no figures, I bet the difference over time is mostly explained by the 401k program vs pensions because pensions didn’t show up in net worth stats while 401ks do.
The age cohort argument is a common response when trying to undermine concerns about wealth inequality. Unfortunately, it just doesn't hold water. See this Pew Research study as one (high quality) example to make the point: www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2011/11/07/chapter-1-wealth-gaps-by-age/
@@DataDemystified Your going to have to point to the chapter or graph you think doesn’t support the idea that it’s more about age than before. Could me my bias (which makes me suspicious of Pew normally), but I’m seeing support for my point not against it.
nice explanation
Thank you!
Nice video very well put together 👏👏 it be cool to incorporate the mindset of the household spending habits as well most people in the middle area and down to a little lower class don’t even think about growing there wealth rapidly buy investing or different ways of income there to concerned with living above there means🤦🏼 as well as overconsumption and life style creep .I see this first hand every day at my job the purchases some people make are down right ridiculous 🤦🏼
Thanks , however , to let such data be more informative , you could have added the C.I.s around such median and average numbers , so that we can decide if such estimates do or don't really hold something of jewels for us , however nice representation of the problem
Solution for inequality is 100% tax on wealth above 5 billion dollar
Wealth taxes are an interesting idea for sure
Great video.
Thanks! Glad you found it interesting!
Does this take into account the fact that a significant portion of the top 10% comprising 2016 are completely different households from those comprising 10% in 1989? Those are not the same individuals or for that sake households. To have a better judgement about inequality I would suggest tracking how the same household compositions changed, using other metrics, like age, education level, occupation, etc. I bet results would surprise you and the inequality problem wouldn't seem that straightforward anymore
Tracking longitudinally as you suggest wouldn’t really help. All you’d show is that the older people get the wealthier they tend to be. What this is looking at is the state of wealth distribution across time. Pinch line: It has become much more uneven
Isn't this all easily explained by the time value of money? If you invest in return producing assets, your wealth will grow as long as you do not spend more than the increases. People who spend more than they make or do not invest in income producing assets will not see their wealth grow. Wealth begins with income. Income only comes from other human beings that you have created value for. The more you look to create value for others and actually create that value for others the wealthier you will be. Not looking to create value for others will result in the opposite.
Excellent example, excellent explanation
Amit Agarwal
From Delhi, India
Thanks!
¿How to account for inflation when doing this?
Awesome video! Data is so intriguing, but skewed so easily. Do you have any topics on macro vs microeconomics? This is where one of the ares I fell asleep in college.
Thanks Ed! I don't have anything on macro vs.micro. Any topics within that that you'd like to learn more about? I'm all for making videos based on topics that my viewers are interested in.
Shouldn't there be 10 10% brackets in your bar graph of comparing 1989 to 2016?
Great comment! The bars represent the cut offs for those thresholds. So there are only 9 because the last bucket is just defined as those above that value. There’s no cap on it since that would just show you the person who happens to the the richest (in the 100th percentile). So think of this buckets as representing cut offs and you get 9 groups.
@@DataDemystified Gotcha. So the wealthiest 10% of the population in 1989 would be worth upwards of $686k. Thanks for the explanation. Also wanted to just say, as a graduate student in the field of data, I appreciate you taking the time to help the general public build data intuition in today's data-heavy world! Keep up the good work!
So the wealthiest top 10% are worth AT LEAST $686k. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clearer!
And I'm really glad you're finding this useful! If you can, please spread the word. I'm trying to build this from the ground up and that's pretty tough without advocates like you!
@@DataDemystified No worries, that makes sense now! I do think it's slightly confusing that in the video, you say that there are "9 equally sized buckets" at 8:23. Because I'm assuming that you mean that there are 9 cutoffs (10th percentile, 20th, 30th, 40th, ..., 90th), and 10 buckets (0.001 percentile to 10th, 11th to 20th, 20th to 29th, ..., 90th to 99.999th). If there were n cutoffs, there would have to be n+1 buckets, right?
Also, of course, I can do my part in spreading the word!
You’re 100% correct. That is a slight error in the way I described the buckets. I’ll see what it’ll take to post a correction. Thank you!
Wealth inequality is an emotional statement. It’s none of my business how much money a rich person earns. Good for them.
Hi Kent. I agree that how much any particular person makes isn't really important or any of our business. On the other hand, how a society chooses to structure itself in terms of things like tax codes DOES affect all of us and wealth inequality is one consequence of such decisions. Beyond that, there is strong evidence that wealth inequality, in and of itself, leads to slower economic growth. That is, if we figure out how to structure society to have LESS wealth inequality, everyone prospers, not just the richest among us. Thanks for the comment and for watching!
Kent, ur comment is overemotional. The person who responded is analytical. You should try to be more objective and educate urself. Your emotions are irrelevant
Very well explained 👏🏾
Thank you!
4443r34rr
I don't know why people say wealth inequality is bad. If person 1 (p1) has income $5,000 and p2 has $4,000. It makes sense that after a year p1 has $60,000 and p2 $48,000. So income inequality widens. This is normal and moral thing how it should be. If you would want to stop income inequality, everybody would have to get same income. Like fastfood worker would need to get paid as same as doctors.
1% now owns 70% of the country’s money.
Great job on explaining data.
Thanks!
9:46 - 9:55 How can increasing wealth inequality possibly be a good thing? Over the past 30 years the median wealth has remained the same, and you don't see how that's a bad thing? Besides that, great video!
I agree with you. The counter argument (which I don’t think outweighs the argument you and I likely endorse) is that as the wealthy getting wealthier is a sign that the entire economy is getting lifted up. As in, billionaires make more jobs and create wealth for all. That doesn’t pan out, but I do want to acknowledge all reasonable arguments and not force feed my views. I’m trying to teach about data less than economics...though obviously you need data to inform good economic policies.
I think you missed the point of this video entirely. The goal is how to think about data, not what you should conclude from that data. Your jump may be a sensible conclusion but that's the next step. Your sloppy jump-to-the-only-possible-conclusion approach is a problem.
It’s all in 2016 dollars. Wealth inequality is a good thing, otherwise everyone is equally poor.
These results make me so angry. I will say, Jeff, you have a wonderful way of explaining information. I will be subscribing to your channel.
Thank you!
I'm curious as to why you are angry? If you are referring to the fact that wealthy people have so much more wealth and the poor people don't have as much you shouldn't be angry about that... the main thing this data is not showing you is the majority of the people in the poor category are not still poor but have moved up to the middle class. It should motivate people to work hard and make more money.
Great information.
Thank you!
Fun fact: the median wealth in Italy is far higher than in the US
I notice that you start right after the atrocity that was the Reagan administration.
Take this chart back to 60 years and stare, agog, at the sudden rapidly growing gap between 'average' and 'median'.
In fact, median is lower *now* than it was in 1989 - and the cost of living has roughly quadrupled.
Thanks for the comment. I started there largely due to the ease of quality data availability but I totally appreciate your point and will dig in a bit more in the future.
@@DataDemystified Also, if you looked at the % of taxes levied against the wealthiest a great majority of that rapidly increasing gap is an equally rapidly shrinking tax burden.
While the burden on the middle class has doubled. The lower class have nothing of measure to tax, but general cost of living has put them in the negatives, despite government social support.
Data Demystified Demystified: Household wealth is not a great measure of inequality over time. Over time the number of people in households has drastically decreased due to more single parent families and people waiting longer to get married. Hence less income per household.
It's clear, all right. People who care about accumulating wealth will do so and people who want to spend will do that. Also, accumulation feeds on itself as investments earn more while consumption doesn't. Conclusion: the envious poor have done it to themselves and the well-off have done it for themselves.
So does this mean that the rich are getting richer at a faster rate and the poor are getting richer at a much slower rate? Or has there been a negligible change?
Absolutely negligible change for anyone that isn't in the top 20-30%. So the rich are getting richer and that's it.
Data Demystified it takes money to make money so the fact that rich gets richer is not surprising. In fact we should continue to see this trend at even a faster pace over the next few years.
@@zechmerquise5281 That's not quite true. Wealth/income inequality can be reduced via tax policy. The fact that we choose not to do so as a society is independent of the fact that wealth inequality HAS to increase. But thank you for the comment!
Data Demystified So to be clear. My statement is actually TRUE since we dont use the tax policy that you are referring to
Data Demystified there is no tax policy loophole that the rich would not be able to find to circumvent the law in their favor. If there was,then the rich will take their money elsewhere. And if that happens, there would be no rich people to tax. It’s not about laws but about natural human behavior. The solution is to find a way to make the rich part with their money in a way that THEY see as a benefit to them and will also benefit others. The whole approach has been to attack and penalize the rich. That doesnt work. The difference is that you are FORCING something on people where as my solution is making then VOLUNTARILY give up their wealth.
Some day it might be a poor or middle class person who ends up rich. Then they wouldnt want to be penalized. We leave that pathway open. Its called the American Dream.
is everyone equal and the game is rigged or are people deferent and some even....SPECIAL 👀
Yes! Both!
Yes I can see the wealth inequality as pointed out in the graphs. However in 1989, when I was 28 years old I fell into the $48K group, now 30+ years later I'm in the top 10% with liquid, hard assets in the top 30th percentile group. We're NOT stuck in any one group it's your individual drive and motivation that really matters. Remember Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates weren't always in the top 1%.
Hi James. Thanks for the comment and congrats on your climb up the mobility ladder! Two points:
1. Upward mobility like yours is the exception, not the rule. See here: ruclips.net/video/qjhvExRgD5w/видео.html
2. Almost every single billionaire today started in the top 1%. Albeit not with the wealth they have now, but virtually every one was given a major leg up in their financial success. Bezos got several hundred thousand from his parents to start his first business...most families don't just have that kind of money laying around to give to their kids. Gates also started off in a wealthy family that owned multiple homes and had the wealth to also give him hundreds of thousands of dollars to start his business. The point is that upward mobility is certainly possible, but it is MUCH harder than these billionaires like to claim. There are millions of people working just as hard as Bezos and Gates, but are still earning pennies compared to them.
Thanks Prof. Galak... a very informative and simplified average to median clarification using wealthgap. How would it look if we add the race classification too... under 4 buckets like we see in IRS visualizations (Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians). Look forward to seeing it under additional dimensions (Age like >60, Education, Gross Income).
Mean
Median
Mode
We need animal height equity enforcement!
Agreed!
Thought this was an ad LOL
Nope. Just trying to educate and inform!
The real question is why did the top 20% see such a boom in wealth. Answer: Stocks! The top 20% regularly invest in stocks. The top 20% own 80% of the stocks. Wealth = Buy stocks. I bought Amazon and Netflix 16 years ago while I was a broke college student. I'm reaping the benefits today. It's not rocket science.
Personally, I'm a bit of a billionaire apologist. They employ so many people, and those employees in turn buy goods and services from everyone else which leads to a vibrant US economy.. Another way to think of it, is in reverse. If Bill Gates pulled Microsoft out of Seattle and put the entire operation in Burundi, would Washington state's economy take a hit? Would there be more economic opportunity in Burundi than there is now?
First, Is it bad for Burundi to have economic prosperity?
Second, you can have successful companies that support many economies without billionaires. In fact, we used to have plenty of this!! But then people got greedy.
@@DataDemystified Of course it's not bad for Burundi to have economic prosperity. What they need are some great capitalists and some billion dollar companies. What if all American billionaires moved their companies to Burundi? Would they not be better off than they are now? Would America's standard of living go down? I'm glad to be where the billionaires are, and I wish Burundi nothing but prosperity.
Why nine??!!!
Households have gotten significantly smaller over the last few decades. So household income is affected and growth looks less. Median income per person is a better indicator of economic differences which compare today to 50 years ago.
A great explanation of wealth inequality- Thank you!
Thanks!
Considering the consequences of wealth inequality in the real world (both in the present and the past), it's easy to conclude wealth inequality is a "bad thing". Of course, this is assuming you care about the well being of the rest of humanity.
I agree. In my videos I try hard not to take a side, but rather to just present the facts and let people make their own calls...but in the comments, I don't mind saying that I 100% agree that excessive wealth inequality (which we're clearly seeing) is a huge problem.
this vid is for people that dont understand median vs average lol
That's exactly what it's for.
I wish you broke it down by age just showing raw numbers like this can be misleading. A modest family can reach a million dollars by investing a few hundred dollars a month for 40 years. exponential growth really skews the larger numbers. A person who invests their money in their 20s might see a couple thousand dollar change in money that same persons wealth could grow by 100k in their 60s
Hi Ryan. You're right that you can always keep cutting the data, but the aggregate data here isn't misleading. The question is comparing wealth inequality over time. As in, if we just took a snapshot at one point , it's hard to tell if that's a lot or a little inequality. But what we see here is a massive INCREASE. That can't be explained just by some modest families saving. Beyond that, saving a few hundred dollars a month sounds wonderful, and certainly people SHOULD save, but the majority of Americans don't earn enough to do that. It's easy to pass the buck to tell others to do more (e.g. save more), but the systems we have in place don't afford that luxury to a huge amount of people. Thanks for the comment!
A clear flaw. No one is track if the rich are likely the same people or is there a rotation. I can tell my my family was in the bottom 3rd. My parents didn't even have a high school education but I'm in top 1% and my sister is in the top 3%. There should be credit for the hardworking people who climb to the top of the pile.
What are you describing is anecdotal data which is completely useless for describing population dynamics as a whole. The takeaway from the data as given is that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the upper income brackets. If you presented a single person's wealth over time on a graph that would be time series data, and would only meaningfully reflect that persons trajectory through time. A single person's data point is overly subject to random chance from a statistical point of view (ie I could randomly snatch the guy that one the lottery or the person who had a kid at 12 and dropped out of high school and didn't turn their life around). Their is churn so some people do move substantially. Poor to middle class isn't all that rare, but middle class to "rich" is substantially rarer (I'm not counting someone who manages to build their retirement fund to 1-3 million as rich but merely upper middle class). There isn't a way to use hundreds of millions of time series data (nor even a way to gather it!) to draw conclusions, so the evolution of the wealth distribution over time is a meaningful metric. None of what is presented is causal or pointing any blame, this was a statement of the imperical data (and why the median is a terrible measure of tendency in distributions with significant skew, or basically any data that is not well described by a normal or t distribution). An interpretation of this though is that none of the spoils are going to the bottom 70% or so (ie the working class is getting paid less relatively (even though the number is roughly the same the size of the slice of the pie isn't) for their contribution to the wealth generating process. You would need different data to demonstrate causal relationships (wage stagnation, productivity:compensation metrics, and etc).
The benefit of doing things this way is that it eliminates bias, if we hand pick a few examples to test a point people have a subconscious tendency to select examples that would support their beliefs ( in other words confirmation bias among other things). I myself have to avoid making these types of claims. For example a part of me would like to say that getting wealthy (and staying there) is 50% luck and 50% hard work, but my reason for believing that is anecdotal (ie people working 80+ hrs/week all their lives with nothing to show for it), but the honest evaluation of the argument is that that is not a data-driven rational argument. The reason I say the data you ask for isn't readily available is that most sources you would gather it from are kept anonymous, and so it's not possible to track individuals from 1 sampling to the next. Although there are some data sets available relevant to the question www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/economic-mobility-of-the-states
If you don't say that rich people are evil at some point in this video, and don't also refer to the false dichotomy between capitalism and socialism, I'm going to throw a chair across my room.
Thank you.....thoughts on the UBER rich creating a false narrative about the 1%, in reality there are about 100 families who over 50% of all wealth in the world. It sure seems like a distraction and distortion of the truth when they focus on the 1%....would love your thoughts on this.
Totally fair point. I focused on deciles but if you zoom to that top one you see far greater concentrations of wealth. Though, I’m not quite ready to say that the narrative is being shaped by those 100 or so families. Even in the top 1%, we’re seeing extreme levels of wealth concentration.
@@DataDemystified Thank you for responding, like many things a lot of factors are involved. Unfortunately I don't see that aspect ever changing.
@@billygnosis6976 Sadly, I agree with you, at least in the short term. History tells us that no economic system survives over the long term, but who knows what will come next.
@@DataDemystified That is what honestly concerns me, I am concerned with a radical changes to current system, which is flawed but the "best" ever created.
Reality, there are a few people that don’t make a ton of money they just Save almost everything!
Should we punish them for being Rich?
Wouldn’t it be fairer to not punish them as they will have enough to not need assistance during retirement!
There so much inequality in professional sports. Asian are so under represented. Does it have anything to do with them being smaller and slower? We demand equality. Tell me the flaws in my thinking?
roderickshawngraham.medium.com/why-dont-we-care-that-there-are-so-few-asian-basketball-players-in-the-nba-97bd92e9f8
See above
the graph at 4:20 is so racist lol
What is racist about it?
I realize if I work 50% harder. i.e. 60 instead of 40 hours a week. I can increase my income/profits by 2 to 3 times. Rents, insurance, food cost stay the same. I even save money on entertainment and vacations since it don't have time to waste money on those things. Let that compound a decade or two and bam I'm in the top 1% of income and net worth. The American dream is still alive. Just requires hard work and sacrifice. Don't hate on the rich. Especially the ones who got there through their own efforts. I came to this country as a refugee at 4 years old. Didn't speak English in kindergarten. I know people who came to this country in their teens and through their hard work are richer than me. Don't complain and say it's unfair. You are mostly responsible for your own out come. America should ask for equity in opportunity and not expect equity in out come because there isn't equity in efforts.
Excellent video.