Income distribution in America - Quintile breakdowns.

[djacobox372]

Right, the point is that we have a growing disparity because the overall income brackets have grown. The middle 20% of America is making much more money, across the spread, than they used to. So is the bottom 20% and the top 20%. Everyone is making more money and so the dollar value size of the quintiles has increased.

Countries with less income disparity means that the brackets are closer together. But that's a worthless bit of information without the actual brackets themselves. The point of presenting the American brackets between 1979 and 2010 is to show that we have more income disparity because we have more income everywhere. It's easy for everyone to be close together when $20,000 separates each quintile. It's much harder when the brackets are $50,000 apart.

You still have 20% of the population in each quintile so the reality is that today's 20% has a higher income than the same 20% from 30 years ago.

If you measure wealth/money by how many tvs, microwaves, and toasters someone can afford, than perhaps everybody is wealthier.

But that's not the issue, the issue is DISPARITY, as we all know that true wealth is a relative measurement, and that measurement relates directly to the freedom and power an individual has.

The middle class today has roughly a 30% smaller "stake" in the countries wealth than they did 30 years ago. That's a huge shift of power from the middle to the top.

 

[panamaican]

If you measure wealth/money by how many tvs, microwaves, and toasters someone can afford, than perhaps everybody is wealthier.

But that's not the issue, the issue is DISPARITY, as we all know that true wealth is a relative measurement, and that measurement relates directly to the freedom and power an individual has.

The middle class today has roughly a 30% smaller "stake" in the countries wealth than they did 30 years ago. That's a huge shift of power from the middle to the top.

That it may be but that has next to nothing to do with income quintiles and comparing mobility through out them in different countries over different time periods.

Plus your assertion has it's own problems. The middle class has a smaller stake in the country's wealth than 30 years ago but that doesn't tell us where that difference is coming from.

It's mostly coming from increases in technological productivity and overseas investments - 2 areas where the middle class isn't positioned to reap gains. So, while their stake has decreased, it's partly because they're not creating any additional wealth in the nation either. The .01% is making more money outside of the U.S. but it's being counted towards U.S. wealth because that's where they live.

If you only looked at wealth generated within the U.S., I would not be surprised if the disparity had not grown as much as feared.

But all of that aside - it has nothing to do with my point about quintile mobility being a borderline useless metric.

 

[djacobox372]

That it may be but that has next to nothing to do with income quintiles and comparing mobility through out them in different countries over different time periods.

Plus your assertion has it's own problems. The middle class has a smaller stake in the country's wealth than 30 years ago but that doesn't tell us where that difference is coming from.

It's mostly coming from increases in technological productivity and overseas investments - 2 areas where the middle class isn't positioned to reap gains. So, while their stake has decreased, it's partly because they're not creating any additional wealth in the nation either. The .01% is making more money outside of the U.S. but it's being counted towards U.S. wealth because that's where they live.

If you only looked at wealth generated within the U.S., I would not be surprised if the disparity had not grown as much as feared.

But all of that aside - it has nothing to do with my point about quintile mobility being a borderline useless metric.

The reduction in the middle classes "share of the pie" is due to the relationship between compensation and productivity. Worker compensation tracked productivity directly until the early 70's and then leveled off as productivity kept going up. The wealth generated from ever increasing productivity has to go somewhere, hence the ever increasing wealth disparity.

Why did compensation stop tracking productivity? It's my assertion that it's due to diminishing returns on compensation, for a long time it was true that if you paid people more you'd get more productivity out of them, but there is a point where that no longer holds true. We reached that point in the early 1970's and wages have stayed at a lower level ever since in order to ensure the most productive workforce.

Basically if workers were paid more they wouldn't work as hard, and keeping the workers working as hard as possible is what capitalism promotes.