rexxit

It's worth noting that Americans also must spend that income in a similarly-inflated market, so it doesn't much matter what their salary would be worth in, say, Uganda. I think any such comparison of global wealth runs into these sorts of issues.

Someone earning in the global top 10% may not be able to afford a house locally. Someone earning in the top 30% may not be able to afford rent and food at the same time in their locale. It makes the percentile meaningless.

Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.

I certainly agree based on my previous statement that income is not wealth, but I was trying to make two points and mixed the messages.

One is that amounts of money that were once considered an unbelievable amount for income or wealth - say $100k and $1m - have now been eroded by inflation to fairly modest money. In the 70s or 80s, having a million meant never working again. Earning 100k a year when a house cost $50k was huge money, and might lead to wealth quickly, if one bought several houses with it.

Another point I'd like to sneak in is that there's almost no modern equivalent to that kind of employed income. On paper, inflation puts it at 400k - so maybe today's equivalent of a surgeon - but the 50k house now costs $500k-1m. Notional inflation being 4x, while the critically important things have gone up 10-20x means that something harder to quantify is broken, and upward mobility isn't working the way we expect. The same opportunities don't exist. We are less likely to turn income into wealth over time than at points in the past, and so the tendency of people to erroneously think high income = wealth may have a reasonable basis in history that has never been less true today.

Edit: and it's not just houses, it's the stock market. The advent of the internet and e-commerce resulting in tech stock growth 1995-today is a phenomenon not likely to be replicated in any other area. We may be running out of growth to be had. The ability to get 10-20x your money over 30-40 years of investments is probably gone, and with it the prospect of comfortable retirement for even relatively high earners.

I've seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you're rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don't have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.

Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with "wealth" may not have to work at all.

People don't become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn't really classify as normal income.

Edit: It's like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it's not classified as income. Meanwhile you're going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don't or can't tax wealth.

Edit2: we've got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you're not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.

Totally agree. Income isn't wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of "millionaire" when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn't even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly "six figures" income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.

That's what I'm talking about also. Experts who are being paid to express an opinion, but in a circumstance where their peers would hold a consensus opinion that opposes what they are stating in court. Those experts are mercenaries.

That's a good way to put it - it's laziness. Maybe it's laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can't be modernized with society. I'm not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.

I've heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there's no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they're on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.

That's the issue I have with the justice system - it's much too loose with facts because it's designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn't have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn't in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you're right in the eyes of the law. It's bullshit.

Edit: if you're a physician on trial for malpractice, "A jury of your peers" would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don't operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.

Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn't have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can't.

Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn't be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying "how do we prevent population contraction" - that's insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.

If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we're all fucked.

Believe me when I say I'm not on corporations' side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.

PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it's not my field and I haven't looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I've seen firsthand the family's emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.

That's interesting, thanks.