19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮

Hot tip - that’s most Lemmy users. I’m guessing there’s also people in the top 0.9 kicking around.

Edit: Aaaand yup, there’s cope in the comments.

Socialists are mostly the champaign kind now, although that doesn’t make them wrong, neccesarily. Honestly, I have trouble picturing the old days when the kind of people I live around would have voted left.

Geez China. So much for lifting a billion out of poverty.

I mean, conditions have gotten better, but clearly there’s gaps.

Yes, and you just posted it. Did you think I was arguing?

Here’s the fed’s up-to-date numbers. So yeah, that’s a decent summary.

Doesn’t it show exactly what I said? Lemmy has a whole lot of top 10% people - I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s the majority. Nobody here is thinking of them when they say “ruling class”. The top 1% also contains a lot of kinda-rich people, who maybe own a couple of car dealerships, but could never afford a jet. If they do something in IT instead of cars, they again might be on Lemmy.

The total is about 170 trillion. For reference, Forbes billionaires, including the non-American ones, add up to 16.1 trillion.

Yep. Not being fascist was an option. In theory, anyway. In practice that stuff always has an audience everywhere.

Yeah, that’s definitely fair.

Ever moving, right? People in the top 0.9% all call themselves middle class, maybe “upper middle class” to shut down any contradictions. That’s because there’s a stigma to being a rich fatcat. For more complicated reasons, politicians like to sweep up most of the bottom 50% that owns basically nothing, as well. The only people who consistently get stuck into the lower class are basically people so powerless they might as well be a thing.

That being said, do be careful that income distribution is quite different from wealth distribution.

Lemmy tends rich and educated. So it would be my guess more than 50% are in the top 19%. Probably by both, since it seems to tend older than Reddit did. What you call that is another matter entirely; wealth and income levels all flow together smoothly in the raw data.

(probably…maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction)

The income distribution would get you closer. The typical way to measure it would be amount earned minus amount saved, right?

Besides being fewer, richer people are able to save a bigger percentage of their earnings. That puts the middle class in kind of a consumption sweet spot - which is why the big businesses mostly target them.

If you want to measure less tangible things like carbon emissions or social opportunities it gets much more complicated, although I have no reason to think the overall story would change.

but us living in the ‘core’ are the 1% of the world

I should point out the international picture is nuanced in a similar way. There’s middle income countries, there’s very rich people in poor countries, and there’s countries like Dubai that kind of defy categorisation. The basic picture that the West is rich holds, but not that it’s all the wealth, and developing economies are quickly catching up because it’s just easier for them to grow. (Developed countries also account for a bit more than 10% of world population)

In the US, actually-doing-better-and-better middle class, for the most part. I’m seeing the top 10% as a usual “center” in analysis of the k-shaped economy. It’s brown people and Trump voters in trailer parks that are actually losing.

Looks like the trend is just a lot less pronounced in Canada, though. We’re all a bit poorer.

If they’re on Lemmy there’s little chance they’re on the wrong side of the class war, rich or not. Class war might be the wrong name for it, even, since the left is now richer on average. War against classes, maybe?

Except the middle class actually does own most stuff, and consumes the most. The ultra-rich are rich, but there’s just so few of them.