About a week ago I had a link to a graph about Estimates of Each Other. It is surprising what things we get wrong. (Though a friend pointed out it is equally surprising what we got right.) Yet maybe it explains a lot of why the younger generation feels they have gotten a bad deal financially. If you think that 20% of the population make a million bucks a year, you might well feel left out, or despairing of ever "succeeding" and feel that the most important thing to do is Change Then System so that the bastards don't keep ripping us off. It also explains why the strategy of taxing the billionaires is so appealing. If you think there are a lot of them out there, who could foot the bill for Everything Nice if we just stopped giving them tax breaks, it makes sense. Only when you realise if we took all of the income from the 1% it would fund the government for about 100 days; if we took all of their wealth - their stocks, their mansions, their businesses and cashed them in - it would fund the federal government for about 9 months. Not to mention that we would destroy the major employers of the rest of us overnight and have a society where no one had any incentive to do anything beyond buying tents and ramen noodles. The number of people who make $1M/year is near 0%. If you raised their income taxes from 35% to 45% it would have no effect on you, except on your feelings. Well, in a dynamic system it would cause more of the to go live in a tax haven, so it would in fact affect you. Badly.
But they are visible, and they feed our primitive urges to break them, because we are sure they must be cheating and stealing or they wouldn't be rich. This upsets us so much because in hunter-gatherer societies having more than twice as much as the average is indeed suspicious. Jobs and roles are similar and interchangeable. If they have nice things, check your pockets. In America if they have nice things so what?
This is also why every generation thinks the previous one had it easy but they have it hard. They are not much moved by reports of cheaper communication, in that a poor person in San Diego can talk for thirty minutes to her mother in Atlanta. That fruits and vegetables are available yer round. That a cancer diagnosis at forty no longer means death even if you are homeless. These mean nothing, because everyone has them. Odd that socialists, who claim to be committed to everyone doing better, stop counting things as wealth once everyone has them. One would think that was the point, and count as a victory.
We have better communication, and think that half the country has more than us even when we are in the top quintile.
We have not stopped homelessness, largely because we have not figured out how to get landlords (or shelters) to operate once the tenants are destroying the place, or keeping the neighbors from sleeping, or molesting the children. The low-hanging fruit has largely been picked in housing. We are looking at fentanyl, dangerous smoking, violence, and sex offenders now. Those aren't easy to solve.
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