- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮
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Complacent middle class here. I would gladly get taxed more if that meant improved health and education and welfare. Not super keen on keeping up the subsidies of oil and gas, and of spending 5% of GDP on American weapons. And yes, we need a wealth tax.
To be fair, there arw many who could use some basic financial education around here.
Canada’s poor richest 1% nearly as poor as poorest 80% :((
That’s awful
According to the World Inequality Index, between 1999 and 2024, the top-1% in Canada grew their wealth from 26% to 29%.
In the same period in other countries, the top-1% changed their wealth:
- in Australia and New Zealand, more or less unchanged at around 23%
- in Europe, more or less unchanged around 25%
- in the USA, grew from 31% to 35%
- in China, grew from 19% to 30%
- in Russia, grew from 40% to 49%
- in Latin America, unchanged at around 36%
- Oceania, grew from 24% to 27%
- Sub-Saharan Africa, shrank from 38% to 34%
Worldwide, the top-1% share was stable at around 37%.
In the same period 1999-2024, the wealth of the bottom-50% in Canada slightly shrank from 15% to 14%. In other countries:
- in Australia and New Zealand, more or less unchanged at around 5%
- in Europe, more or less unchanged around 3%
- in the USA, grew from 0.6% to 1%
- in China, shrank from 14% to 6%
- in Russia, shrank from almost 7% to less than 3%
- in Latin America, unchanged at 2%
- Oceania, decreased from 3% to 2%
- Sub-Saharan Africa, slightly increased from below 2% to 2.1%
Worldwide, the bottom-50% grew their share of the total wealth slightly from 7% to 8%.
Source for the top 1%, here for the bottom 50%.
You can play around in the linked diagrams for other countries and regions.
Geez China. So much for lifting a billion out of poverty.
I mean, conditions have gotten better, but clearly there’s gaps.
yah china lie about its numbers a lot, im beginning to wonder about its population count as well
There is ample evidence that inequality is on the rise in China.
Yes, and you just posted it. Did you think I was arguing?
Lot of SIMPs for China around Lemmy even for a reasonable critique. Can be hard to tell sometimes
Yeah, that’s definitely fair.
No, all fine. Sorry if my comment was misleading.
Their wealth needs to be seized and redistributed. They can still be obscenely wealthy, but they also need to forced in psychiatric programs since most of the uber wealthy families of the world have mental illness running through them.
I suggest reading up on the Mars family (the people who own Mars candy bars and other confectionery). The story of their OCD in doing anything at all for more money and market share was terrifying.
Hard agree. Hoarded wealth is a negative asset to the country and its economy.
No inheritance tax will do that.
The argument against inheritance tax seems to be that we don’t want to screw the inheritors out of the ability to own a family property or something, but it seems like it’s be REALLY easy to draw a line and make it such that the estate is taxable if more than $X value is going to a single recipient and/or if the estate is valued in excess of $XY that it’s taxable and/or if the recipients assets exceed $Z that entitlements exceeding $X are taxable. I’m sure there’d be a few edge cases that would miss the mark, but it seems like it would be a lot better than the current system of generational wealth building up with the new generations literally not needing to work a day in their lives and still pass on wealth to their kids.
Can’t believe a bunch of English expats would recreate feudalism.
A nation of renters and landlords.
We should be dragging them from their homes and blessing them with the prayers of Saint Luigi. Nobody collects this much wealth in a fair or just system, one that also impoverishes workers so much it’s causing a silent genocide of the working class.
They enacted strict gun laws but expanded which law enforcement can carry firearms for this purpose.
They don’t care about any mass shooting victim. They claim to remember the 14 of polytechnique just to make it look like it is.
In reality gun laws in Canada were always about suppressing labor uprisings, sectarian uprisings (like the Irish in the 19th century, the Quebec bloc in the 1970s, and the Oka crisis in the 90s). Americans like to talk about taking up arms against the government but Canadians actually have.
But on a more realistic note I wish it was that easy to just get a mob of people to drag them out. But unlike times past when it was possible, they live so far apart from us and travel via helicopter and airplane as much as possible specifically to be as hard as possible to corner.
HAVING RICH foreigners buying up all the houses isnt helping either, and the lack of stem jobs too .
don’t know about canada specifically, but in every american housing market i’m familiar with the overwhelming majority of housing is bought up by the local/national parasites.
Because American companies tend to have higher capital because of “innovation”. That said, it is also the same issue here in Ireland because of intrinsic ties between the two countries. American (and Canadian) vulture funds buy up properties here and charge rent ar extortion rate. Foreign multinationals are the real bad immigrants, not the ordinary everyday immigrants. And yet, the blame is shifted to the latter because it’s a tried and tested method for the elites to pick everyone’s pocket while being distracted.
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.
What qualifies as “middle class” these days? Roughly 24% of Ontario public sector workers are on the sunshine list. While this doesn’t give us a ton of insight into the private sector, this would still suggest that if we say the 19% is the middle class that to be middle class you have to be making more than $100k/year…
Not trying to argue, just trying to understand where the goalposts are.
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.
The problem with the sunshine list is that it never changes with inflation. It’s basically become a tool for morons to hate on the “overpaid” public sector instead of calling out their own underpaying employers.
Oh, absolutely. I’m just trying to use it as a marker to try to figure out where the goal posts should be for what we are calling “middle class.”
I have a friend who works in central Ontario for a fortune 500 and they take home ~80k/year, and I’ve considered them and their family middle class for a while, but they also were telling me that they’re overextended and struggling to keep up on interest payments…while also being denied a consolidation loan. So maybe they are not really middle class…?
People really don’t like feeling responsible for the things we’re all responsible
No raindrop feels responsible for the flood.
Lot’s of wealthy posters. But they often hide it, because if they don’t they get called a liar or flooded with unimaginative threats.
And it’s too bad; we should encourage them to post. Know your enemy and all that.
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?
💯
Complacent middle class, or rapidly shrinking and struggling to not fall further middle class?
Land hoarding is the problem.
Yeah, the issue here isn’t the middle class, it’s as usual, the owner class that’s the problem
The middle class is their tool. They are incented to perpetuate this bullshit.
The middle class is like the personal carbon footprint - it’s a fabrication created by the ultra-wealthy to divert responsibility from themselves. There is only the owner class and the working class.
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.
In Pikettys Capital in the 21st Century the breakdown for US wealth distribution was something like: top 1% has ~30%, top 10% has ~50% (that includes the 1%), the next top 40% have almost all the rest so like ~49%, and the bottom 50% of the economic ladder has that 1%. That was a decade ago, and its gotten worse since then
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.
Agreed - the data does show that the middle 40% own ~50%, and that since this bloc consists of more people they therefore have more consumption (probably…maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction). These facts should not absolve the wealthiest of their detrimental hoarding, but us living in the ‘core’ are the 1% of the world so yea I also agree that it does not absolve us of our extreme consumption relative to most people of the world. I am reminded of a comic(or a tweet or something) where some guy is complaining about the traffic and someone else responds with ‘brother YOU are the traffic’.
I respectfully disagree. The middle class is not perfect, but the issue here is the ruling class
How are you (OP) blaming the “middle” class? What could you suggest nurses, teachers, fire fighters, etc do to solve the problem of wealth inequality?
I genuinely want to know because it seems to me that we control nothing and have no excess to give.
Stop performing those services. En mass.
…so let people die, stop caring for our neighbours, allow ignorance and illiteracy to fester. Seems extreme and misplaced.
A better, less-nihilistic approach might be: stop buying things, cancel subscriptions, sell dividend-paying stocks, etc. Or even better: a general strike.
Wait, what difference does it make whether the stocks pay dividends or not?
A general strike is stopping doing those services en masse.
You get that they’ll just de-professionalize those roles and let untrained, unskilled hacks and quacks loose on the general populace, right? I mean you want to have your kids taught by some goof quoting Grok, and your grandma getting her life saving treatment from Bobby Kennedy approved witch-doctors that’s where you end up if the professionals all decide to quit En Masse.
What’s going on in schools isn’t much better.
Lol, too true 😁
Who suffers the most? The vulnerable
Do you mean “incentivized?” But yeah.
Incent is correct in fact 🤓
incent verb in·cent in-ˈsent incented; incenting; incents transitive verb
: incentivize … a large prize … may also incent some employee referrals. —Bill Conerly
Its definition is literally a reference to “incentivize,” so all that proves is that language has rotted slightly
Back in the 1840s apparently.
Not if you actually read the chart
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.
Trump voters in trailer parks that are actually losing.
It’s hard to be sad about that - their choices did this to themselves(and, annoyingly, also to the rest of us)
Yep. Not being fascist was an option. In theory, anyway. In practice that stuff always has an audience everywhere.
The system is progressing as expected. The US is further ahead on the timeline. If they collapse first, that may trigger a systemic reset here, before we’ve reached their stage of fascist dystopia. Get your demands ready and demand more than people did during the 1930s. Much more.
I believe the wealth inequality has clearly being caused by the Fed, cheap money, bailouts, which debased salaries and gatekept basic necessities like shelter. Occupy Wallstreet had it right, and all the other things are symptoms of currency debasement.
Imagine playing a game of monopoly where someone can just create new currency, would you sell your house for cash, or would you horde them and borrow as much as possible? Thats whats been playing out in the economy, and how an unprofitable company like Tesla can be a 1.5 trillion dollar company, tech oligarchs and AI bubbles are built on moral hazard.
That’s a common idea. It does not explain well what’s been happening though. The Fed has definitey done things to exacerbate inequality and accelerate it but the system creates inequality without the need for Fed intervention. The post-Depression to 80s period was out of the ordinary for inequality and for prosperity of the working class. Look at some wealth share graphs that span into the 19th century or earlier and you’ll see that the system creates these effects even on gold standards with no Fed.
This is what the US looks like:
Here’s one going further back in some countries:
And here’s a more detailed picture in the US and Canada going to the 1920. Note that given the first one, i equality didn’t explode in the 7-year period between the creatiom of the Fed and 1920. It was far high way earlier:
I believe this fits the rest of the story much much more neatly:
And I think the alternative explanations proposed by various economists that don’t lean on labour power are a distraction that enables continued inequality growth, while we chase geese. Oh let’s push that lever, it’s going to help, a decade passes, inequality worse. Oh let’s push that other lever. A decade passes, inequality grows. Oh let’s push that other … Meanwhile the only solution that has ever worked in creating prosperity for the many is staring us in the face.
BTW I did not downvote but I suspect a lot of people here know these things and just don’t have the energy to explain their view so they just hit the button. I’ve been there. I also used to believe the monetarist explanation.
Well the late 80s in the second to last chart was when the US excluded housing from the CPI, which dramatically cut interest rates. What makes you think the wealth isn’t created via lower interest rates, which came from untethering the CPI to reality?
I don’t think interest rates created that wealth for two reasons.
One is because of contradictory trends - interest rates were higher (3-8%) duding the 1800-1930 period of rising inequality than during the late 80s-onwards period. Also interest rates were lower (0.5-4%) during the 1930-1965 period of decreasing inequality. Rates fell persistently under that level only after the dotcom bubble in 2001.
The other reason is is that given I can see brutal inequality happening during the 19th century without many of the modern financial instruments (and across diff countries), I have to conclude that there’s a more fundamental process that drives inequality. For me the best explanation so far is the process of capital accumulation which inherent to this economic system.
E: If you wanna see another consistent (inverse) correlation, look at how tax rates evolved during these periods.
It is long overdue time to eat them.
Finally, the top 1 per cent hold almost a quarter of all wealth in Canada. A person in the top 1 per cent owns 210 times more wealth than an average person in the bottom 50 per cent.
By contrast, the bottom 40 per cent collectively hold slightly more than 3 per cent of total wealth in Canada, each with an average net worth of just under $87,000.
