Someone posted this in politics. I pointed out that if you take out the top 1-5% and run those numbers again we will see a different picture. Wealth disparity didn’t change much since the pandemic.
The “supporting data” are averages though, which are the fake news of statistics, so I suspect it’s more to do with the richest 5% of the population owning the vast majority of the assets (stock, housing, etc).
Zuckerberg’s wealth increased from 55 to 177 BILLION since 2020. If there are 100 million adults under 40 in the US, his growth alone represents $2,440 for every one of them. All you need to do is extrapolate the growth of the richest 1-5% assets and the bottom 95-99% are well behind where they were in 2020.
Remember! The corporatocracy-owned media exists to make you believe dystopia and poverty is actually freedom and prosperity.
Lots of inheritance paying out is the only logical explanation.
Because nothing got better, but your parents dying and leaving you half a house is a huge gain in wealth when you don’t have anything, leading to a huge percentage increase in wealth.
I’m not young, but that’s basically what we (sadly) are waiting for. My mother is well off and 82 and we have to wait for her to die to get our lives to a place where we’re all satisfied with them, i.e. selling the house we have now and moving somewhere else because we live in an undesirable location and our house is worth very little comparatively despite being a nice 3-bedroom in one of the safer neighborhoods in town.
She knows it too, which is the worst part. She already told me that she’s giving her giant house to me and not my brother so I can sell it and we can get out of where we’re living. God I hate that she has to think about things that way, but worse, my daughter has to think about things that way.
Sounds like it’s just you and a brother, a few generations ago 5-10 kids was normal, and a house didn’t mean much because it’s value wasn’t inflated.
Common people are actually able to inherit significant stuff now, which considering government inaction, is pretty much the only way to rebuild the American middle class.
It’s slow, and it sucks, but over time it leads to improvement.
Like say two families have two kids, and only one kid from each goes on to have kids, for simplicity we’ll say with each other. The grandkids are going to inherit from their grandparents, parents, and childless aunts/uncles eventually. That’s three houses, even if there’s nothing else
That’s wealth concentration, it’s how the upper class has been doing it for centuries.
I’m not talking about home ownership increasing, I’m talking about the amount of kids decreasing.
Like, say there’s a pizza, if it’s just you, that’s more pizza than you should eat. If you have to share it with 9 people, there’s not enough for anyone.
Because the price of homes drastically increased, and number of kids keeps declining, that means there’s more “pizza” and less people to share it with.
Even without homeownership, less kids still leads to a larger inheritance per child.
Maybe so, but that still mostly only applies to white people. A larger inheritance per child doesn’t matter if the inheritance is a paltry sum. Or no inheritance at all.
Have you ever heard of West Virginia, or Kentucky?
That’s not even getting into poor white people living in cities.
Shit, look at the republican voter base, it’s mainly poor white people. Just because some have money, doesn’t mean it “trickles down” to other people for having the same amounts of melanin in their skin…
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
Keep in mind, he was talking about what republicans were/are doing, not saying it as something we should do.
It’s decades later, and you’re still carrying that water pail for republicans and dividing Americans by race instead of wealth.
Got it. You’re not going to read the article. Well, I’ll just leave this here for you:
In 2019, the median wealth (without defined-benefit pensions) of Black households in the United States was $24,100, compared with $189,100 for white households. Therefore, the typical Black household had 12.7 percent of the wealth of the typical white household, and they owned $165,000 less in wealth. The average gap is somewhat smaller in relative terms but much larger in dollar terms. The average Black household had $142,330 in 2019 compared with $980,549 for the average white household. This means that, on average, Black households had 14.5 percent of the wealth of white households, with an absolute dollar gap of $838,220.
The massive Black-white wealth disparity is nothing new in this country. It has persisted for centuries and has been apparent in consistent, nationally representative data for at least three decades. The gap between Black and white households appears to have widened again in the latter part of 2020 as the pandemic and deep recession took hold, especially hurting Black Americans.
Looking forward to you avoiding those inconvenient truths in favor of more personal attacks.
The numbers are inflation adjusted. One may disagree with official numbers capturing the “real” inflation, but inflation is the relative Cost of Living.
The article also gives a breakdown in where the gains were, and an estimate of how much net worth raise was from increases in home prices.
Now going to disagree, however inflation is cooling and consumers are beginning to realize that there are other options for them rather than paying what price gougers demand.
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