Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people

[muriel_volestrangler]

(FT article: when I opened it in an incognito window, I got the whole article without hitting their paywall. If that doesn't work for others, I'm sure we can find some way. There's also the author's Twitter thread, at the bottom of this post)

So what happens when we move down the rungs? For Norway, it’s a consistently rosy picture. The top 10 per cent rank second for living standards among the top deciles in all countries; the median Norwegian household ranks second among all national averages, and all the way down at the other end, Norway’s poorest 5 per cent are the most prosperous bottom 5 per cent in the world. Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor.

Britain is a different story. While the top earners rank fifth, the average household ranks 12th and the poorest 5 per cent rank 15th. Far from simply losing touch with their western European peers, last year the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20 per cent weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia.

It’s a similar story in the middle. In 2007, the average UK household was 8 per cent worse off than its peers in north-western Europe, but the deficit has since ballooned to a record 20 per cent. On present trends, the average Slovenian household will be better off than its British counterpart by 2024, and the average Polish family will move ahead before the end of the decade. A country in desperate need of migrant labour may soon have to ask new arrivals to take a pay cut.

Across the Atlantic it’s the same story, only more so. The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia.

https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945

Link to tweet

[murielm99]

1. It is interesting

that the poor in the U.S. are resented if they have anything. If they have a nice computer, car or TV, someone believes that they are somehow cheating the system. The poor are not entitled to anything.

[brer cat]

5. Spot on.

I have heard many times "they must have stolen that." If they are in college, then they got special treatment, leaving some white child out in the cold. Disgusting.

[scarletlib]

2. Reagonomics, supply side policies, trickle down taxation.

Give to the rich and it will trickle down to the rest of us. Yeah.

[FrankTC]

3. Fascinating Graphs

The graphs in the Financial Times article (glimpsed via the tweet -- I couldn't get past the paywall) are fascinating. A great depiction of the income distributions in a swath of countries, and their evolution over recent decades. What's been happening here in the US is shocking: The upper 10% has been gaining income like a rocket climbing to the stratosphere. The climb of the top 1% probably has been even steeper. It's easy to imagine how financial inequality translates to political inequality. It's hard to imagine how to change course without a more widespread recognition that our inequality is in a league of its own and constitutes a serious problem (Bernie can't do it all by himself). And then there's the Supreme Court, oy veh.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Try this link

https://archive.ph/JIv9z

[malthaussen]

6. Nice to see it all laid out like that.

One of the things that puzzles me is that the dirt-poor white folks in the UK and especially the US do not seem to resent the ultra-rich, in fact they seem to worship them. There are a lot of reasons for that, but it seems especially peculiar in light of how much they resent each other.

-- Mal

[Marcuse]

7. Status in lieu of wealth.