This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
it HAS destroyED America
Ah, yes, this is only an issue in the US… And also, nothing other than the US matters or exists.
why a ban?
Mod log just says “Ban evasion, repeated violations of ToS” across a few dozen coms. I guess mods got sick of them.
I’ve noticed lately a lot of mods are banning people posting a lot. Which is really fucking stupid because they are removing the people creating interaction. Even if they are just copy and pasting from reddit. A) who cares, b) many people here aren’t on reddit, and c) the mods are going to kill their own communities if they keep this up.
Exactly, they’re cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. No one ever learns.
There was recently a discussion about this from someone who crossposts stuff from reddit to lemmy and got banned for it. Opinions vary but it’s mostly anti reddit. Can’t find it now though. Myself I’m not sure. Importing trends and “reinforcement learning” or manufacturing cons(t)ent from reddit is problematic. But it’s not like most lemmies aren’t already trained like good little dogs to be neoliberal imperialists. I mostly see the same shite trending on lemmy as on reddit.
It definitely is hilarious that the top post on lemmy currently has double banned tags lol
I dont know about hilarious. The largest lemmy instance banning users for posting content they dont like from reddit? Thats more than just stupid. Its a message what Lemmy is becoming. When Reddit is more free than Lemmy, we have sad days ahead on this social network.
Lemmy.world, that’s why.
He can post on other instances like Lemmy.today but it doesn’t get the same amount of viewers.
When the largest instance is ban happy (I guess Americans?), it’s going to be controlling the entire Lemmy network.
This sort of thing is not even banned on reddit.
Looked through this sub-Lemmy’s front page.
#Unban_sanitation
upper middle class is a black woman?
Sometimes.
so much so that they represent the majority of the upper middle class?
What an odd thing to take issue with in this comic. You’re the only one here that seems to think the skin color of the characters in the comic are even relevant.
I’d say the top 1% being represented as white is kinda important. The rest doesn’t.
Odd that you latch onto that but not how the lower 50% is depicted. And nowhere does it say each person is a racial representation of that class.
You’re real fucking dumb.So you don’t hve a problem with the rich WHITE lady, just the moderately rich BLACK lady.
I think it’s clear what you have a problem with.
I’m sorry but this is a wildly inaccurate way to portray the data. This image is portraying not the cut that every group gets, but the wealth that the average individual in that group gets. These individual averages per group are then added up to 100% and then everybody gets a slice out of that 100%.
To show you how this is inaccurate say we did this with 10 people. We have 2 groups. Group 1 has 9 people who average 1 dollar and then group 2 has 1 person who owns 2 dollars. In that example group 1 has 2 dollars combined and group 2 has 9 dollars combined. This would mean the groups own 18% and 82% of the wealth respectively. But according to how this comic portrays it, as per Capita, the pizza slice of group 1 would be ⅔ of the pizza and group 2 gets ⅓ of the pizza, which is not accurate at all to how the wealth is actually distributed.
Using this per capita metric is highly misleading if we are to use it in that way. The top 1% in the USA in actuality holds 32,5% of the wealth in the USA which would create a totally different pizza than the one in the comic.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2011.2,2026.2
The point of the bottom 50% enjoying 2 pepperonis is the accurate part
The cartoon would then have to show the relative sizes of the groups as well (about 6 to 1), so 1 person gets 2/3 while 6 people get to share 1/3. Or, each person in the 1% gets 2/3 of the pizza, and each person in the 50% gets 1/18 of the pizza. Or, the 1% get 12 times more. The real figures are a lot worse, with the bottom 50% holding about 1/50 of the total household wealth, while the 1% hold 1/3 and the rest being distributed among the other 49%. The reality therefore is that those 6 people have to split 1/50th of a pizza, for 1/300th of a pizza each. What would 1/300th of a pizza look like? Crumbs I reckon.
Anyway, it’s a cartoon.You make a compelling argument. One word for you though, per capita.
One word for you though, per capita.
That’s two words.
Fair enough.
ALSO two words, although I know you never claimed otherwise. ;-)
This image is portraying not the cut that every group gets, but the wealth that the average individual in that group gets.
I think that’s the whole point. It’s not trying to paint an overview of the economy, but rather to show what portion a typical member of each class gets to live off of.
Images like you describe that show the breakdown for each entire class? Those are not hard to find.
I just don’t think it’s an honest way to show the data. You could use the exact same method but put the richest individual as one group and the entire rest of humanity as another group and show that the top 1 person gets the entire pizza except for one microscopic crumb but of course that would be extremely misleading. I’m fine with per Capita wealth per wealth group as a metric but it doesn’t lend itself to be used in circular graphs. A bar graph would be less misleading. But of course that wouldn’t be good in a comic. I’m also against extreme wealth inequality but we are not going to solve it by misrepresenting the data. The non misrepresented data is already telling enough.
Yo know who I expect to have the most scrutinized data? Cartoons.
Dr. W. E. Coyote PhD, now that was a scientist with some goddamn tegrity!
There’s 4 people in the image. If the 4 of them split a pizza based on their wealth, this is what each would get. How is that misleading?
1: I think the average reader of this comic won’t understand it correctly without thinking deeply about how “per capita” affects the size of the pizza slices compared to a non per capita version.
2: Looking at this graph one would think that the entire problem with wealth inequality lies with the top 1%. However the next top 9% own more wealth combined than the top 1% do. This comic represents the “merely wealthy” as a victim but I would argue the opposite. To even enter the top 10% category you need over 2.5 million dollars. Top 5% is almost 5 million dollars. They get an unfairly large slice of the pie too.
The top x% owning y% of combined wealth is a standard measure of wealth inequality. This is literally what the Lorenz curve describes and the basis for the well-known Gini coefficient.
This cartoon does not use “top x% owning y% of combined wealth”. It uses a per capita version which is very different from what you’re talking about. And that’s my entire point.
Top 1% … holds 32,5% of the wealth
And people over 55 own 73% (most of the top 1% that isn’t tech billionaires, are also old people after all). Start taxing corporations more and they won’t be able to retire the way they have, so they’re naturally against that. Good luck figuring it out without magically increasing birth rates to have more workers per retiree, or having your old people live in squalor so young people can have better lives (potentially driving up birth rates if they feel they can afford children)
I cannot stop seeing this idea overlaid on every thing that I see or do or hear about. Every action is filtered through the lens of it being extractive and manipulative.
I feel extremely stressed because I see the bars of the cage and no one else around me wants to acknowledge them.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Take back power anyway you can.
Tenant unions, worker unions, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, tool libraries.
Work towards owning your business and your home and your community WITH your coworkers and your neighborhood and your community.
We can overcome the tyrants if we work together. Federal elections are only one small piece of the puzzle and no one will save us but ourselves.
I do not like this. I would like it to stop please.
Then do something. Why does someone else need to rattle the cage for you to break free? Why are Americans, who masturbate to the 2nd amendment, so afraid of taking back their country? There’s 350 million of you, trillions of guns, and merely a few hundred of them. Start turning the streets red.
“All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustimed.”
Because those who see what you see are in areas where they would be alone, considered a lone madman. Rest assured, people are gathering and talking.
Reject consumerism, make things instead.
We have friends coming over, instead of ordering food from a mega corporation I am going to make pizza and potato wedges.
Where do the ingredients come from? Are you growing your own grain and milling it into your own flower? Do you have your own cows or goats to make your own cheese? Did you build your own oven? Fired with wood you cut down yourself?
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter. It only makes you feel like you’re doing something.
You’d be more effective buying the pizza from a locally owned place.
You’re right, guess I’m just gonna give everyone hand jobs or are you going to tell me I need to build my own sex robot from scratch?
Giving someone a hand job, is doing it from scratch.
What’s the sex bot for?No, because I was planning on using a water based lubricant
Don’t let perfect be in the way of better.
I’m not.
I’m asking people to not treat better as the solution; They way they do with rent controls and school loan forgiveness. Buying locally is fine to do, for you in your life, but it has no effect on the larger problem. Too many people pretend it does.
When making something nice I would buy the ingredients from local independents where I can. I can almost see the farm I get cheese and garlic from on a clear day but there is a hill in the way.
Its also risky though, they sell fucking massive slabs of halloumi style cheese. Its a lot of money but also a lot of cheese.
Can’t do it for every ingredient with every recipe, but I am fed up of the just give up attitude I often hear simply because something isn’t 100% perfect in every way and using that as a reason to not even try. So I do what I reasonably can.
Also, ingredients are cheaper than a fast food place. Better quality too.
Like I said, it makes you feel better, that’s fine.
But don’t pretend it’s fighting the fight. Though if you don’t pretend, it may not make you feel better.Other than refusing to consume, what do you suggest doing that will achieve more and is easy for most people to do?
Organizing, protesting, voting and voter registration drives, marketing and coms. Even starting a union owned business, or something similar. Those kinds of things make a difference. Individual purchasing decisions don’t.
Even starting a union owned business
Hey everyone. You want to change society? Just start a business. Easy peesy! Don’t make small changes in your life, make massive financial overhauls.
Many of those are much more difficult for most people to do, are of questionable benefit or they already do.
Refuse to give them money, it is the only language they understand.
Not buying the very last link in the chain doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does. You’re cutting out the part with highest markup. Skipping an entire manufacturing process.
You can get the ingredients for a fraction of the cost compared to a finished product.
Maybe. But price wasn’t the argument being made. That’s a non sequitur.
I’m sorry where do you think profit comes from? It’s not grown on profit trees, it’s baked into the price. Higher markup, higher price, higher profit.
Non sequitur my ass
The idea is capitalism. As in, buying from large corporations. Whatever the price or profit, the topic was about who and where you’re buying from, not for how much.
“You want to change society. Yet you participate in it. Curious…”
I buy the majority of my groceries from a local farmers market. Things I can’t get there I buy from Wal Mart. I buy pizza from a local mom and pop shop, where they live above their restaurant. I do everything I can to make buying from mega corps a last choice decision. My partner and I will be starting our garden next year and growing a lot of our own vegetables. We’ll be raising pork pigs so we don’t have to buy factory pork. There’s so many little things you can do as an individual to choke off the billionaires.
But if you want to keep bending over like you seem to be acting, more power to you. Just don’t blame others for society collapsing.
It really do be like that.
remember - there is no such thing as stratification within the working class. there is no “upper middle class” - it’s all just propaganda to get us distracted by a better house, greener lawn, culdesac, suit wearing folks…
There is an “upper middle class.”
If you point to the average doctor or lawyer, and tell poor people “those guys are working class, same as you,” half of them are going to tell you to get bent. Cause when they see them with their mcmansions that somebody else cleans, and their giant lawns that somebody else mows, and driving their mercedes and corvettes, the average poor person is not going to believe you when you tell them they’re the same class.
Maybe if everyone was educated and enlightened you could pull that off, but expecting all or even most people to be like that is idealistic and naïve at best. Perhaps even callous and out-of-touch.
The grain of truth is that we are indeed all “working class,” and that class conflict
isshould be about working class versus owner class; and that the owner class actively pits upper-middle class against middle- and lower-class, and middle-class against lower class.But telling everyone “there’s no such thing as/no distinction between upper-middle, middle, and lower classes” is not the remedy. You need to remind them that even though there is stratification within the working class, we’re all on the same team and need to work together.
Telling them otherwise comes off as gaslighting and is not going to convince the majority of working class people, because it directly contradicts the evidence of their eyes and ears.
And besides, upper-middle class people will hear that and think “so you want to reduce me to poverty just to level the playing field!”, middle-class people will think “so you want to eliminate the middle class and make us all poor?,” and lower-class people will think “so you’re erasing my struggles and pretending I have it just as easy as the middle- and upper-middle classes?”
Denying the reality isn’t helpful. That’s like using “colorblindness” as an argument against racism. We need to acknowledge our differences in order to accept them. Pretending there’s no difference will never work, and only advantages the owner-class attempting to maintain the status quo.
could not agree with you more.
I am one of those people that has had circumstances improve. I grew up in a trailer that honestly should have been condemned rather than allowed to have someone live in it. I’ve gotten used to sleep for dinner when I was younger having my only good food be the fact that one of my friends mom’s was our lunch lady and she took pity on me pretty regularly.
over the last 15 or 20 years I’ve somehow worked my way into a good paying job and when I read your first paragraph it was a little bit of a wake up for me since a lot of those things apply now.
I would say the main difference that I have between now and then is that I have more control over my life personally, if I were to lose my job I could probably find another one and even if I couldn’t I could sell my house and be okay for a while. homelessness is not right around the corner like it was when I was a kid and we got evicted three or four times.
The real difference between classes though is not that I can afford my electricity bill every month or make sure that my kids have probably too many toys, as far as I’m concerned the primary difference is whether you have control of how other people live their lives.
The owner class has propaganda machines, owns government officials, can collaborate with each other to ensure that wages are suppressed and to ensure that the right people make the right business calls and make a bunch of money at the rest of our expense.
it’s insane to me that the life that I have used to be common in America and I feel so lucky and grateful that I have it at all today. all I have is a house a job two cars and two kids and a cat I guess.
that should not be too much to ask for for the regular person. everyone should get to have that kind of stability in their life.
I vote and believe the way I do not because I think it will drastically change my own life but because I think that others deserve what I have, it should not be extraordinary for people to be able to survive on one job and build a family if that’s what they want to do.
The average lawyer makes less than $160k, the average physician makes $275k.
At least make a modicum of effort to base your commentary in reality.
That changes nothing about what I said.
At least make a modicum of effort to base your commentary in reality.
You should take your own advice…
half of them are going to tell you to get bent.
I don’t disagree, I just think that this response is a function of a lack of class consciousness and is really an exercise for you, to teach your audience, that “sells labor and limited lifespan” means working class. (eliding the details here…)
In short: it’s audience specific. My reply here was meant for the audience here. I might not say it the same way to my neighbor, or a friend, etc.
i guess i don’t disagree that in the interest of time and energy we do consider there to be multiple middle classes, etc, but i consider it harmful to our unification as one working class.
Except for cops. Remember: they’re not working class, just trash class.
MAGA think they’re “merely wealthy” because they got a new (to them) pickup three years ago. So this will fall on dumb ears.
Reminded me of this little sketch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL_I6_0FcTg
However, it ain’t just MAGA unfortunately, there are many liberal people also confuse debt and wealth too. Taking vacations, buying tech, and then complaining about living paycheck to paycheck.
As infuriating and dangerous as MAGA is, just remember who the true enemy is. There is no war but class war.
Oh trust me. I know
this will fall on dumb ears.
In fairness, you did say “MAGA” after all. ;-)
Yes, but, my neighbors just bought a bigger car than me, so I had to buy a new one as well - on a loan. If I skip my sons birthday and instead make overtime, maybe my boss will notice and give me a raise (so I don’t have to subtract the loan interest from my sons college fund). Anyways if immigrants actually payed their taxes this would all not be problem… What was I doing again? Ah I was on my way to vote split ticket again; devided government keeps both sides in check.
Refusing to consume is one of the greatest acts of resistance that pretty much everyone is actually able to do, and would even benefit from doing.
More accurately, the lower 50% is forced to fight over some cheese stuck to the lid and the grease- soaked bottom of the cardboard box.
It’s like the excess sugar and bad fats most Americans eat everyday and think their chronic issues are normal, but it’s all the shit foods, and they don’t care, numb on junk food and their viral slop algorithm is all they do under the oppressive inequality they keep voting for.
Aside from the imagery of the share of the pizza, I appreciate the detail of the lower 50% not even having “a seat at the table” :/
Yes although it could be a whole family out in the cold for greater realism.
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I’d sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
Yeah but they would never admit to being a 1%er here if they know what’s good for them.
And besides, nowadays the real oligarchs are 0.1%ers or even 0.01%ers.
1%ers at this point are literally just the higher end of the upper-middle class…
Yeah, in terms of the wealth distribution the 1% are closer to the 99% than to the 0.1%. It’s borderline incomprehensible how wealthy the 0.1% is compared to the rest of us.
I gather this is roughly true wrt income (other estimates place this closer to 750k per household), but not wealth (which i believe is ~14 million to be in the top 1% in the US). Note that this income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains and that a 10% return on a 14 million portfolio is 1.4 million per year in passive income.
Most people in the lower 50% believe that anyone that has any money, especially $1M+ is part of the 1%. The complete lack of understanding of income and wealth escalation in the last couple decades is what keeps many people voting against their own interests. Many $1M-aires believe that with the right government policy and lower taxes, always lower taxes, they would quickly become part of the 1% and be “just like Musk”. They believe that the system that aides and abets billionaires would equally benefit themselves and cannot see that they are part of the riff raff, the same as a homeless person, in the eyes of the billionaire class.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Which is still, just insane to think about.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there’s people out there, somewhat “commonly”, going “Hmmm yerrs, let’s put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed…”
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It’s nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just…damn.
I don’t wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)
Haha yeah sorry I was struggling to convey that properly. US American here.
Like, after the paycheck comes in, and we pay all the bills, yeah having some 1000’s just left over to decide what to do with would be quite cushy.
We’re a couple that both work decently paying part times. Living with family makes that possible, but unavoidable debts (and climbing insurance rates) the last few years balanced it out.
So I mean, we live comfortably and we’re materially content. But also times are really scary where another 2008 could hit us real bad.
So it’s still weird imagining people just having lots of padding floating around. Lol
