Thanks for calling me out on these points. (Also, thanks to titotal for providing other useful metrics!) I find your take insightful, though from these arguments, I still very much stay with my overall position.
I’ll respond in different comments, to help keep discussion manageable.
When I said “inequality is on the rise”, my statement wasn’t very precise. I find it interesting that the gini coefficient has stayed somewhat flat for the last 20 years in the US, though would note that:
1. It clearly rose significantly right before ~20 years ago. (Looking back, I think “20 years” wasn’t a well chosen number to start this post with)
2. It still did definitely rise, according to the official stats, in the last 20 years. I think the graph you provide is arguably deceiving because it sets the bottom of the y-axis at 0. Consider this instead. Here it looks like it did grow from 40 in 1995 to 41.3 in 2022. While this might seem small, I suspect it still adds up.
3. The US’s gini coefficient is quite bad compared to many other countries. Given it’s massive wealth, I think this is a sizable deal.
4. I found titotal’s post below quite interesting and relevant on this.
5. For my main argument, the more key relevant question is something like, “Is it true that there’s an incredible amount of wealth contained by the ultra-wealthy, or similar?” So while I find the discussion about inequality interesting (I especially enjoy the use of official data here), It’s arguably not particularly key. It could have well been a mistake for me to begin with that sentence—I was quickly thinking that people would “know what I meant”, but it seems to have gotten in the way of my point.
Thanks for calling me out on these points. (Also, thanks to titotal for providing other useful metrics!) I find your take insightful, though from these arguments, I still very much stay with my overall position.
I’ll respond in different comments, to help keep discussion manageable.
When I said “inequality is on the rise”, my statement wasn’t very precise. I find it interesting that the gini coefficient has stayed somewhat flat for the last 20 years in the US, though would note that:
1. It clearly rose significantly right before ~20 years ago. (Looking back, I think “20 years” wasn’t a well chosen number to start this post with)
2. It still did definitely rise, according to the official stats, in the last 20 years. I think the graph you provide is arguably deceiving because it sets the bottom of the y-axis at 0. Consider this instead. Here it looks like it did grow from 40 in 1995 to 41.3 in 2022. While this might seem small, I suspect it still adds up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
3. The US’s gini coefficient is quite bad compared to many other countries. Given it’s massive wealth, I think this is a sizable deal.
4. I found titotal’s post below quite interesting and relevant on this.
5. For my main argument, the more key relevant question is something like, “Is it true that there’s an incredible amount of wealth contained by the ultra-wealthy, or similar?” So while I find the discussion about inequality interesting (I especially enjoy the use of official data here), It’s arguably not particularly key. It could have well been a mistake for me to begin with that sentence—I was quickly thinking that people would “know what I meant”, but it seems to have gotten in the way of my point.