Professors from upper level universities – who are by that level, often culturally immersed in the upper echelons of wealth.

Average salary is around $98,974 for professors, $69,911 for associate professors, $58,662 for assistant professors, $42,609 for instructors, and $48,289 for lecturers.

Average CEO “salary” once you include all the bonuses and other perks?  Around 10 MILLION DOLLARS (and that’s a conservative estimate).

End of story.  End of FUD.  Thanks for playing.

This creates such a dull caricature of a clear problem with really nuanced causes and it’s somewhat disappointing to see this from PBS.

That’s what tequila is for.

fuckin’ or fightin’

Until we are willing to look at politics as a civic duty instead of a career, and to view campaign contribution laws in light of the nastiness they represent, AND elect politicians who are willing to risk everything to do the RIGHT thing, nothing will change.

It is truly a sad day to see smug politicians arguing over which benefit to the poor should go first, and how deeply, when there are millions of people who continue to lose money, homes and jobs because of the turmoil caused by Congress over a budget deal, and the recession that was made worse by the folly of Wall Street.

Congress today, God help us all, seems more than willing to refuse many Americans the decency of a fair opportunity to make and build their own piece of the pie, or even have access to a doctor when they are sick, while at the same time refusing to increase even a miniscule the taxes of the super rich. It is mind-boggling how insane this is, and how obvious it appears, yet how willing Americans are to ignore it.

I suspect that the “40% have only 0.3% of the wealth” is very wrong. For example, as one of that 40%, I have a million books, right here in this box. I have hot and cold running water, electricity, internet, a few tv’s, lots of clothes, food, stuff and junk.

The disparity is such that it’s hard for most people to even wrap their heads around. You own books, but people at the very top own publishing houses. You have running water, they have desalinization plants to fill the swimming pools on private island getaways. You have internet access, they own technology companies. You have TVs, they own movie studios. And every time you spend money on any of those things some portion of it goes toward making them even richer.

It’s true that you are fortunate enough to have material wealth and security that far outstrips that of the average African, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is a tremendous imbalance of wealth and power in your own country.

With my morning coffee, I whipped up a simple Python script to model this. If I used 5% annual interest rate, the five wealth quantiles controlled 2,7,15,28 and 47% of wealth, respectively. If I used 10% interest rate, these wealth quantiles became 0,4,10,25 and 60%, respectively.

So even in an impossibly egalitarian society of perfectly equal salaries for perfectly identical people, this is how much wealth inequality you necessarily get just from age differences. And yet even this baseline is unacceptable to many people. Once again: the only thing that Ariely’s study “proved” is that most Americans are utterly innumerate.

Anyone advocating a society where the richest fifth owns only three times as much wealth as the poorest fifth is implicitly advocating a society where the average person, after three or four decades of work in adulthood, has to show for it only three times as much as what he started with in his twenties.

Capital does not get destroyed –  it is its allocation that we are discussing. The problem is that many people in their twenties start with nothing, while some start with a lot. How they then grow it is relatively irrelevant.

The top fifth creates jobs for the middle two-fifths

If by “create jobs” you mean “condescend to loan out their otherwise hoarded capital because they cannot use all of it themselves but still want to get returns from it”, then yes. Sort of the way feudal lords “created jobs” for their serfs when they had them farm their land…

Why should people who don’t work have nearly the same amount of wealth as the hard workers at the top?

So the people at the top are billions of times more hardworking? And their kids just happen to almost always billions of times more hardworking than the kids of non-wealthy families? Remember we are talking wealth, not income.

Sapienti sat. Thank you and good night.

I’m not sure about the accuracy of the shack portion (the quality of living being low, the absolute cost of building the house being too high) – it can’t be THAT bad in Sweden ;) I picked on the house statement because I’m questioning the price I will be paying for mine.

I guess there is some kind societal alternative around this by using a truly massive annual forced redistribution of wealth, but in such a society nobody would bother to do any work anyway, so again homes would not exist for anybody to own.

Edit: actually, I did misread your statement. I got it now.

From the implicit constraint that the people in their sixties can’t own more than three times wealth than the people in their twenties, which is necessary to reach the “Swedish” wealth distribution.

The mathematics is simple, but obviously counterintuitive to most people. Even in a perfectly equal society where everyone earns the exact same salary and saves the exact same percentage of it, the wealth distribution would still be massively distorted because the old people have worked much longer than the young and thus have a lot more show for it, especially after adding the compound interest. This is no more unfair than the fact that in a staggered marathon race, people who have been running for three hours have together covered vastly more distance than people who have been running for five minutes.

Where do you come up with such assumption?

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/03/25/swedish-inequality-datapoint-of-the-day/

The only thing that Ariely’s “study” proved was that most Americans are completely and hopelessly innumerate, but surely everyone knew this already.

Anyone advocating a society where the richest fifth owns only three times as much wealth as the poorest fifth is implicitly advocating a society where the average person, after three or four decades of work in adulthood, has to show for it only three times as much as what he started with in his twenties. In such a society, homeownership would be impossible, for starters. If you phrased the question this way, I doubt that majority of people in any country would support it.

Everyone should study and pass along these fantastic charts from Mother Jones

Will do!  Thanks for that link!