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Canada’s Richest 1% Nearly As Wealthy As Poorest 80% (www.readthemaple.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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19% would be the complacent middle class 🤮

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[–] 45 points 5 months ago (1 child)

The middle class is like the personal carbon footprint - it's a fabrication created by the ultra-wealthy to divert responsibility from themselves. There is only the owner class and the working class.

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  • [+] -9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Except the middle class actually does own most stuff, and consumes the most. The ultra-rich are rich, but there's just so few of them.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    In Pikettys Capital in the 21st Century the breakdown for US wealth distribution was something like: top 1% has ~30%, top 10% has ~50% (that includes the 1%), the next top 40% have almost all the rest so like ~49%, and the bottom 50% of the economic ladder has that 1%. That was a decade ago, and its gotten worse since then

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Here's the fed's up-to-date numbers. So yeah, that's a decent summary.

    Doesn't it show exactly what I said? Lemmy has a whole lot of top 10% people - I wouldn't be shocked if it's the majority. Nobody here is thinking of them when they say "ruling class". The top 1% also contains a lot of kinda-rich people, who maybe own a couple of car dealerships, but could never afford a jet. If they do something in IT instead of cars, they again might be on Lemmy.

    The total is about 170 trillion. For reference, Forbes billionaires, including the non-American ones, add up to 16.1 trillion.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Agreed - the data does show that the middle 40% own ~50%, and that since this bloc consists of more people they therefore have more consumption (probably...maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction). These facts should not absolve the wealthiest of their detrimental hoarding, but us living in the 'core' are the 1% of the world so yea I also agree that it does not absolve us of our extreme consumption relative to most people of the world. I am reminded of a comic(or a tweet or something) where some guy is complaining about the traffic and someone else responds with 'brother YOU are the traffic'.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    (probably…maybe? that seems like something that might need more research to quantify, and probably has easily skewable results in either direction)

    The income distribution would get you closer. The typical way to measure it would be amount earned minus amount saved, right?

    Besides being fewer, richer people are able to save a bigger percentage of their earnings. That puts the middle class in kind of a consumption sweet spot - which is why the big businesses mostly target them.

    If you want to measure less tangible things like carbon emissions or social opportunities it gets much more complicated, although I have no reason to think the overall story would change.

    but us living in the ‘core’ are the 1% of the world

    I should point out the international picture is nuanced in a similar way. There's middle income countries, there's very rich people in poor countries, and there's countries like Dubai that kind of defy categorisation. The basic picture that the West is rich holds, but not that it's all the wealth, and developing economies are quickly catching up because it's just easier for them to grow. (Developed countries also account for a bit more than 10% of world population)

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