America’s drastically shrinking middle-class
This graph shows how in the USA the share of total net worth held by the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles has decline drastically in the last two decades.
https://www.trustnodes.com/2021/07/11/americas-middle-class-drastically-shrinks
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Unfortunately, the post is using this data to promote cryptocurrency as one way to counter this shift in wealth ownership. They also draw other specious conclusions in the article.
Maybe just posting the FRED data directly would be better than pushing crypto… ?
The problem with this data is that two things happened at different times — first, as a result of the housing bubble, the net worth of the middle class “seemed” to go up —- then when the housing bubble led to lots of housing defaults, a lot of the wealth of the middle class disappeared. BUT — the period since the beginning of the recovery from the Great Recession might not indicate an ABSOLUTE decline in wealth by the middle class but a dramatic increase in the “fictitious” wealth of the very very rich — and much of that wealth is fictitious (stocks, particularly). What we would actually need is to have a look at the REAL VALUE of wealth held by those middle class folks rather than their SHARE of total wealth —
Capital grows by interest. So, interest is to blame. But how can increasing wealth inequality coincide with lower interest rates?
‘As the capitalists get wealthier, their time preferences go down even further because they can’t spend all their wealth on consumption. As more and more people become indebted and can’t borrow more, interest rates are driven down until they are determined by the people with the lowest time preferences.’
https://www.naturalmoney.org/endofusury.html#tpsc
Cryptocurrencies are energy impossible and unsecured rabbit holes. Money and accounting are two of humanity’s greatest inventions and tools and there is no actual reason to reject them. The real problem is the monetary and financial paradigm which has always been alternatively monopolized by either the palace or the private banks. Make the money system serve humanity instead of humanity having to slavishly serve it by integating the new paradigm of Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting into the solely debt based system…and many additional benefits not the least of which will be human and planetary survival will follow on.
But what is a middle class? Thomas Piketty notes,
Obviously, Piketty has done yeoman work in providing an historical, political, and cultural context for the current economic situations. But in the final sentence of the above quote Piketty seems to give credence to the wrong headed notion that he can grasp the “intrinsic complexity of each particular society [and] the fundamentally continuous structure of social inequality” and reach across all this uniqueness “to make rigorous and objective comparisons.” Seems impossible to me. And a wish that could lead to some very mistaken conclusions. We can study and sometimes understand other cultures ONLY BECAUSE we all live within a cultural framework. By seeking to make only rigorous and objective conclusions we damage or lose this potential.