Key paragraph:

“He neglects to mention that many of them are actually just retirees. According to Saez and Zucman, whose data Stewart uses, more than 40 percent of all wealth belonging to Americans between and 90th and 99th percentiles is held by the the elderly, meaning age 65 or older. This is what makes wealth data a tricky way to measure class below the very tiptop of the distribution. Stewart’s “9.9 percent” includes a lot of working professionals and business owners with gilded academic résumés, sure. But it also probably encompasses a lot of 75-year-old former accountants and nurses and guys with construction businesses who made a comfortable living decades ago, bought a house, and paid down the mortgage while saving for retirement. There’s no real way to tell a consistent story about who these people are, which makes it a bit hard to blame them for the death of opportunity in this country.”

This is a great rebuttal. We seem to ignore that wealth changes over a person's life.

When average wages are dropping, are they actually dropping or are wealthy people leaving the workforce at a greater rate than lower income people (just starting their careers) entering it?

Kind of what we'd expect when the baby boomers retire, no?

Census Canada has an income explorer that includes wealth percentiles by age (and sex, by province etc)

http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/dv-...

It's quite a stark difference in the percentiles from 20 to 40 to 60.

Slate is absolutely right that without further controls for things like age, these percentiles are misleading

I don’t think that is a fair rebuttal. There has been a systemic transfer of wealth from the young to the older. Social Security and pensions get funded; universities and schools do not.

Citation needed?

Education is the 2nd largest expenditure in California:

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_CA_statel...

Number 1 expenditure in Texas:

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2018_TX_statel...

People perceive education to be underfunded, but digging at the data it definitely is one of the Government's highest spending priorities...

Student loan growth is arguably a decent proxy. Entire generations coming out of school with negative wealth is a pretty new thing.

Does this amount to a systemic transfer of wealth from young to old (OP's complaint?)?

Student loan growth correlates to the (seemingly unbounded) rise of college costs, along with the willingness of the Government to back loans for them?

I'd argue that college costs are rising specifically because it's so easy for students to get loans because of Government intervention. :(

Also to be considered is that it used to be the case that entire generations did not go to college (in fact we're only at 30% of folks now...).

One still has a generation who were educated on subsidised education now reducing those subsidies, per capita, to the next. The former then expects the latter to work to fund their Social Security, Medicare and pensions as opposed to working to redistribute those hand-outs over the broader population. (Not taking a stance. Simply eliding a policy theme. My bet is SS, Medicare and pensions will be dismantled within a few cycles to fund a UBI and universal healthcare, with total pay-outs to seniors going down to pay for broader pay-outs across the population.)

There has been no reduction of education spending on a per-capita basis (or any other form of measurement).

https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1970_202...

It has grown at an amazing rate (as have Medicare/pensions etc).

Half of the income of the middle 20% of retired folks (those making less than $65K) comes from the government subsidies you'd like to cut. The 2nd 20% gets 2/3rds their income from the government and the bottom gets practically all of it. Cuts here will materially impact the poorest elderly.

Citations: https://usafacts.org/reports/annual/2018

My personal TL;DR is that we've been throwing money at all these problems and they are still so far from being solved :( Actually throwing money around seems to make things much worse.

People are taking a NIMBY style stance (cut those programs I don't use and give me/people like me the difference -- definitely don't cut my programs) that is not going to achieve anything but further animosity and grief :(

"There has been no reduction of education spending on a per-capita basis (or any other form of measurement)."

You have the per student basis? And how much of this so-called "education spending" goes to things which have nothing to do with the students (such as research only loosely affiliated with a university - e.g. through its medical school)?

You mention NIMBYism. I would regard that as the principal vector of wealth transfer.

Nimbyism is only a regional factor.

I think we agree this is a national conversation.

Local themes can manifest at scale. Many large cities are affected by generational NIMBYism. That collects to produce a macroeconomic effect.

But the data doesn't show that there's a bunch of rich old folks mooching on the labor of everyone else.

Basically the median elderly person has enough money to pay off the median house and then nothing else. After a lifetime of work isn't this acceptable?

Secondary source: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/time-to-bury-pew-report...

On mobile otherwise I would link in the primary data.

The whole she distribution gets brought up all the time, but wealth inequality is extreme in each age group. Wealth inequality isn't a lifecycle thing where it's either dominated by generational transfers or accumulation over lifetime. See, e.g., http://www.demos.org/blog/9/8/14/wealth-distributed-extremel...

what's so key about that? I and many others know that the Baby Boomers hoarded wealth to create their own class that is very hard to enter into. You can certainly 'blame' them when it comes to things like Prop 13 and their inability to protect social security for future generations.

That doesn’t really undermine the idea that this is a set of citizens who systematically block egalitarian social change. There are many mechanisms through which that happens — local government and real estate just as much as elite academic and cultural institutions.

Thanks for the link!

I don't think the rebuttal makes a fair characterization of Stewart's article. Slate's argument comes down to "Stewart is taking his eyes off the prize, asking us to focus on the 9.9% when the 1% are really the problem" but I didn't interpret the Atlantic piece as implying that those at the very top are innocent in all this. It was more saying that the upper class (9.9%) have been complicit as the top 0.1% have garnered an increasingly vast portion of wealth.

Stewart is asking those in the 9.9% to be more cognizant of those below them, to stop looking up at the 0.1% and realize that the actions they take to improve the outcomes for their children are reducing income mobility.

Asking is totally not constructive. What is his plan?

Without that the piece is worthless blame shifting. Calls to action are pointless when no action is suggested.

Or is he asking us to figure it out? That worked well so far... /s