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We hear the buzzword 1% thrown around quite a bit. But what does 1% actually means. Well let's look at percentage.
If I have a quantity of something, and I have 1% of it. Then that tends to mean that this quantity is finite and measurable in some way. Right? I mean I'm not saying anything that's not making sense so far right?
Some how does someone measure wealth? Well one has to ask where does wealth even come from in the first place. Wealth comes from capital and capital comes from markets. There are plenty of markets that generate revenue, and no 1 person or 1 group of people control every conceivable market (the government COULD but doesn't). And even then, seems like "wealth" is a living number subject to all sorts of fluctuations. So there is volatility in wealth.
But how would one even go about even calculating the total wealth in the first place? Perhaps taking the overall volume of all markets combined? But geez, how would someone do that. Considering some markets intersect, and there are markets within markets. For example if I offer financial consultation and financing to restaurant businesses. Then in effect aren't I in two markets at the same time? So how do we measure that?
The bottomline is that markets are WAY too dynamic to even measure. So how is a person part of the 1% when we don't even know what it's one 1% of?
Now let's talk about income, and how that can also fluctuate as well. Now I don't think anybody has an actual yearly take home salary of over $1 million a year. What they have is over a million dollars in options. But does this actually play into yearly income? Well of course not. The base salary of most senior management at big companies is somewhere around 250k to 300k. That's it. But yes they would have over a million dollars in possible options.
So this only means that someone has the potential to fall into the 1%. How about people who sell their house? They go into the 1%. How about people who get an inheritance. They would be part of the 1% as well. But that's the key, the 1% is a pretty volatile number. People don't seem to generate 1% type of income every year. These are spikes in income at best.
So what we've learned that wealth is not a finite number (obviously). And we've also learned that there is not really a 1%.
While your are essentially correct you'll find it impossible to splain this to the Class Warfare Dolts who will simply stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling "Na na na na ... ad nauseum". Hatred of the wealthy (for no particular reason) is axiomatic to their thinking. Destroy that and you destroy the lemming.
Now let me play Devil's Advocate: Why do you hate THE CHILLREN!?
While a naive reporting of either income or wealth wouldn't be the best indicator of that sort of thing, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be possible to have a pretty good ordering of people according to economic wellbeing.
Such an ordering would need to take into account things like age (old people on average have a lot more money, but they often have no income), family wealth (so college kids from rich families don't get to cry poverty just because they technically have zero income at the moment), and, to some extent, cost of living (something usually ignored when people cry about worldwide 1% numbers -- I could live very well in a lot of countries on an income that is less than poverty level in the U.S.).
Probably the easiest way to do this would be to divide people into categories, then, and then figure out percentiles within categories, though with some emphasis on how likely people are to move from the 1% of one category to the next. That is, are we measuring 20-somethings in such a way as to predict which of them will most likely be rich when they are in their 40s?
Old people who sell their houses or get reverse mortgages wouldn't automatically jump up the list (why would they since they're just liquidating assets they already had? Though, I think housing is a weird case, since your primary residence counts toward your net worth but manages to be a necessity and is not a liquid asset -- I wouldn't really be any richer if my house's value went up by $50k this year), especially since having a million dollars in the bank at age 70 is not anywhere close to the same as having a million dollars in the bank at age 25. A 25-year-old millionaire is pretty rich. A 70-year-old millionaire is just a middle class person who saved for retirement.
This sounds complicated, and to some extent it is, but the results would still pass the "sniff test."
The "1%" is a label for a portion of society that isn't necessarily one percent of the population. It's a group most people can identify when they see it. There are clearly going to be borderline cases, but while we can debate whether someone earning $250k per year in San Jose is in the 1% or someone who bought a home at age 25 and watched its value go up to seven figures (but who won't be selling it) is in the 1%. No one is arguing that I'll be part of the 1% anytime soon, and no one is arguing that such-and-such super rich person isn't.
The name makes it seem like the category is a little easier to define than it really is, but that doesn't make it a useless category.
You lost me at "nobody has a salary of $1,000,000"...
Show me the job listing that guarantee someone $1,000,000 of income a year. Someone can earn $1,000,000 in a given year. But I doubt there is anyone guaranteeing $1 million a year indefinitely to anyone.
One can talk about athletes. But they're only guaranteed that money for a limited amount of time. And that's only if they have a guaranteed contract. Which most don't.
Again, on it's best day, 1% estimates can only really be volatile and indicate a spike in income.
You could easily take "year end" data from any year and calculate the total $ and then figure what 1% of that is.
When you do that you will see a large group of people who are in that list consistently year in and year out.
THEY would be the "1%".
What year end data? This data would come from far too many sources to actually have a reliable number. And even then you would have to measure this over a period of 10 years or more.
We hear the buzzword 1% thrown around quite a bit. But what does 1% actually means. Well let's look at percentage.
If I have a quantity of something, and I have 1% of it. Then that tends to mean that this quantity is finite and measurable in some way. Right? I mean I'm not saying anything that's not making sense so far right?
Some how does someone measure wealth? Well one has to ask where does wealth even come from in the first place. Wealth comes from capital and capital comes from markets. There are plenty of markets that generate revenue, and no 1 person or 1 group of people control every conceivable market (the government COULD but doesn't). And even then, seems like "wealth" is a living number subject to all sorts of fluctuations. So there is volatility in wealth.
But how would one even go about even calculating the total wealth in the first place? Perhaps taking the overall volume of all markets combined? But geez, how would someone do that. Considering some markets intersect, and there are markets within markets. For example if I offer financial consultation and financing to restaurant businesses. Then in effect aren't I in two markets at the same time? So how do we measure that?
The bottomline is that markets are WAY too dynamic to even measure. So how is a person part of the 1% when we don't even know what it's one 1% of?
Now let's talk about income, and how that can also fluctuate as well. Now I don't think anybody has an actual yearly take home salary of over $1 million a year. What they have is over a million dollars in options. But does this actually play into yearly income? Well of course not. The base salary of most senior management at big companies is somewhere around 250k to 300k. That's it. But yes they would have over a million dollars in possible options.
So this only means that someone has the potential to fall into the 1%. How about people who sell their house? They go into the 1%. How about people who get an inheritance. They would be part of the 1% as well. But that's the key, the 1% is a pretty volatile number. People don't seem to generate 1% type of income every year. These are spikes in income at best.
So what we've learned that wealth is not a finite number (obviously). And we've also learned that there is not really a 1%.
The top 1%, or the top 0.1%, or the elite are idiomatic expressions to make a point.
What year end data? This data would come from far too many sources to actually have a reliable number. And even then you would have to measure this over a period of 10 years or more.
You're thinking way too much. First you clear all human beings of racism by simply pinning it on government, now you fail to understand how the IRS (or financial institutions or demographers) can identify the top 1% of earners in a given year.
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