So, You Know You ARE the 1%, Right? [View all]

[Johnny Rico]

http://scienceblogs.com/casaubonsbook/2012/05/23/so-you-know-you-are-the-1-right/

So with the return of spring comes the return of Occupy, which by and large, is probably a good thing. OWS deserves some props for drawing attention to inequity, for bringing radicalism back, and for showing a very complacent corporate and political leadership that the people still have bite in them. Generally speaking I approve of Occupy.

One of the things I don’t approve of, however, catchy as the framing is, is the “1% vs. 99%” rhetoric. The reason I don’t is that I think it functionally masks really deep inequities – by putting the second percentile together with the 92 percentile, it implies a fundamental symmetry between people who are truly and deeply poor and those who are more than comfortable.

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Let’s look at the 1% – on a world scale. According to the CIA world factbook (and the IMF releases similar numbers), the top 1% of the world’s earners make 34K or more annually (per capita). The world’s top 1% richest people have total assets (that’s everything you own) valued at a quarter of a million dollars or more. My guess is that a not-insignificant percentage of my readers fall into the category.

48% of the world’s 1% are Americans. If you were to reduce this to 100 people (always a useful exercise), according to World Bank Economist Branko Milanovic in his book _The Haves and the Have-Nots_ almost every single one of the people in the 1% would come from the developed world – not a single person from Africa, China, Southeast Asia except Singapore, South America except Brazil, India, Eastern Europe or Russia (obviously there are rich people there, but not enough to be statistically significant).

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Our increasingly tenuous environmental situation makes it clear we can’t afford the 1% – on a world scale as well as an American one. So we will have to turn ourselves to the incredibly difficult process of keeping what is retainable for as many people as possible, and coming up with a new way of life that is vastly more equitable – one that still has many of the necessities of a decent life, but vastly fewer of its luxuries.

(quite a bit more at the link)

While I don't agree with the conclusions (we're not about to equalize income on a planetary scale, the very idea is absurd), it's an interesting way of putting the "99% vs 1%" debate in perspective.