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A comment on The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore. Parent comment

Re:The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore by mhneu on Saturday December 31, 2016 @04:51PM (#13293380)
No, the wealth gap is not explained by real estate.

The problem is that the 0.01% -- households worth more than ~$100M -- have received almost all the wealth gains since 1980. That's not just real estate -- it has to do with globalization as well as tax and policy decision.

So the very rich have gotten much richer, while median incomes (I.e. middle class incomes) have not increased.

See Fig 1 of this paper: https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf

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Re:The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore by sobani on Monday January 02, 2017 @04:01AM (#13299957)
According to [1] the return from 1980 to now is 57.5 fold. So anyone who started with 'just' 2M would have ended up with more than 100M.

It's not surprising that those who started with the most, also got the most gains.

[1] http://www.moneychimp.com/features/market_cagr.htm

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