"Inequality tends to be greater in developing countries than wealthier ones. The United States is an exception."
"In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065 – less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively."
> 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite?
How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.
> This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed
I didn't bring up the figure - I was just remarking on how I had a different reaction to it. And the remainder is also distributed in a non-diffuse manner.
> If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are
Do the majority of people have "a high quality of life"? I'm not sure that's true, but assuming it is true, then one issue is the massive power imbalance in terms of control over society: small numbers of people having huge influence over politics, the media, social tech companies etc.
> Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold
Which I was not doing. I'm not sure what would be the best distribution - but if I can't look at it quantitively, I think we can consider it qualitatively. Would we be in a better place if we moved towards more wealth inequality or less?
Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it. In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%. And even in the top 1%, a lot of the owners are like retired dentists or early employees at Microsoft. They don’t exercise meaningful power over these companies by virtue of ownership.
That diffusion of ownership means that capital usually has much less power than the managerial class in terms of actually running the company. Jamie Dimon owns something like 0.1% of JP Morgan. In a traditional Marxist analysis, he’s actually an employee. He makes money from his labor. Even after 20 years the dividends from his JPM stock are less than his compensation as an employee.
You have this class of people now whose wealth and power doesn’t derive from owning the means of production, but by having credentials that persuade a diffuse group of shareholders to appoint them as managers of these corporations. And Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
> Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it.
It's unclear why you even mentioned the US specifically. The so-called "modern corporation" and "the traditional Marxist scenario" are both US. Although Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, he emigrated to the US at age 12, and Carnegie Steel was a US company.
> In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%.
This definitely makes a lot more sense than "Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth."
Of course, I'm just quibbling here. I don't disagree with your main point:
> Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
"Relatively"? According to what metric? I think the US has one of the world's highest Gini coefficients, at least among Western countries.
"Only"? 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.