> most of the increases in wealth since the 70s have gone to rich people.

That itself isn't enough to state poor people became poorer, only in comparison to an ever increasing moving goalpost of what poor means is that statement enough to say poor get poorer.

Median personal real income has grown by about 35% or so in the past few decades. The average is quite a bit higher, I'm just talking about the median.

Household income usually isn't as good an indicator because household size has shrunk.

That is not what has been stated though. They said the majority have become poorer, not the poor.

Whether that's true or not, to me, seems to depend on your definition of individual wealth, it either being relative to total wealth or rather quality of life -- but it's certainly not the same thing.

Bezos becoming richer through stock gains costs me nothing, because his wealth increase is purely speculative. He didn't take that billions out of the economy, or from the poor, or from anyone.

So I think this is not a good measurement of whether or not the majority have become richer or poorer. A much better measurement is do they have more stuff, or better stuff, or a higher quality of life than before. This is the level I think most people care about. Not whether some rich people got richer (mostly from stock growth) faster than I did.

Apart from most of the small book shops in the world going out of business?

Why did they go out of business? Probably because they offered worse prices and worse service. By taking less money from his customers, Bezos makes his customers richer than if they shopped somewhere else. The few business owners who are affected and are made worse off are rounding error and do not change the fact that the median person is better off.

Someone else becoming richer does not require me to become poorer. Everyone's quality of life can increase and the best may still outpace the lowest.

> Someone else becoming richer does not require me to become poorer.

Oh but it does.

Systemic inequality engenders winner-take-all dynamics. We see this very clearly in the data: as capital becomes more concentrated the rich grab more and more of the surplus. Eventually all growth will be captured by a few large enterprises.

Now, even if you don't go all in on Piketty and you give fuck-all about the poor, it should be clear there's an issue here. We don't live in a static world. Someone else becoming richer doesn't make you poorer... until new players join the game. The rich capture all the economic surplus but it's the poor keep having all the babies. So now you've got no choice but to commence with the somewhat unpleasant business of liquidating the poor. Get them hooked on opiods, send them off to wars, drive up the cost of housing and schooling -- do whatever it takes to drive down birth rates and increase mortality. There's no money for these new mouths to feed because it's literally all going to the rich.

And long term this becomes problematic. Again, even if you give fuck all about economic justice, history has proven such systems to be woefully unstable. Humans aren't like rabbits -- they just don't and lie down in a hole and starve to death quietly. Unlike natural systems that tend to course correct smoothly human systems tend to just collapse.

Additionally we are learning more that psychological effects of poverty translate to material outcomes, like higher mortality rates, even after controlling for baseline access to material benefits like health care or nutrition or education.

For example, Last Place Aversion is a real psychological effect that motivates people in their voting habits, e.g. minimum wage laws. Status signalling effects in medical outcomes are also an area of active research (e.g. the richest person in a poor neighborhood can end up having significantly better longevity outcomes than a wealthier person who happens to be the poorest person in a rich neighborhood).

Relative wealth has material effects on health, mortality, etc., which look to be driven by psychological effects and persist even when controlling for material benefits.

In other words, if you're in the middle class and your perspective is that you have to work harder to be less relatively well off, this psychological factor can be a cause for genuine material harm.

I think we are only just beginning to understand these types of inequality effects.

> Eventually all growth will be captured by a few large enterprises.

You can't just assume that a trend will continue in a linear manner forever.

>Systemic inequality engenders winner-take-all dynamics

The data is that the rich don't stay rich , which is why the majority of the rich for any reasonable level of rich are first generation, and have been so for a long, long time.

And the majority of the poor don't stay poor, as FRED data shows.

> The data is that the rich don't stay rich

This is, of course, yet another lie that must be told to justify what is a deeply evil system. Dig a little deeper [1] and you'll find capital concentrations are extremely enduring, particularly those tied to fixed assets like real estate.

The thread is full of all sorts of highly motivated reasoning and half truths to try to avoid what is a very simple and very obvious truth: all the economic surplus is being captured by the rich. Not most, not the majority, absolutely all of it [2]. In such an environment it should be obvious -- even if difficult to admit it -- that the poor can't do anything but fuck off and die. Or did you think the falling life expectancy and falling birth rates were just blind luck?

[1] https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/upshot/the-benefits-of-ec...

The difference between my data and yours is that yours post-selects one or a few families that were rich at time X and remained so at later time Y, while mine takes all people of wealth Z at time X and shows that the majority are below Z at time Y. The Italian paper admits they are not tracking families, but surnames. Read the actual paper, not the pop recount of it. The second link doesn't address that the top 1% varies wildly over time, which my data does. Static snapshots miss lifetime and intergenerational mobility, both of which are not insignificant in the US.

Your paper is about Florence, and does not apply to the wider world. Instead of reading a pop account, read a more direct account [3]. They explicitly state their account does not match the same research or outcomes from other places and times. They reach an elasticity for this group of around 0.02, and note this varied "from under 0.2 in the Scandinavian countries to almost 0.5 in Italy, UK, and the US". The only reason their account got widespread coverage and the others didn't is because the others don't reach a conclusion that sells as well.

But that result is not applicable to modern US. They state this directly.

For example, here's [1] a more recent paper on a more relevant dataset - intergenerational mobility in the US, UK, and Germany. It doesn't reach the same conclusion as your Italian paper.

Probably the most comprehensive look at mobility is the Chetty et al paper [2] that looked at all tax records for several generations and found mobility in the US is consistent with what it has been for decades stretching back into the 1900s.

Most interestingly, they compute transition probabilities over time to move from one quntile to another by generation. Put this into a markov chain, and you'll find that it takes very few generations for nearly perfect mixing of incomes. (I've done this years ago - try it). These transition probabilities match ones from the FRED research which are only for recent people.

So, in short, the rich don't stay rich as a group. Post selecting the few that did is simply bad statistics and misleading.

A simple experiment you can do yourself is take the lists of Forbes 400 riches over time, and see how many are first generation, and how many drop off the list over time. You'll find that the top in general do not remain so very long.

It's easy - try it.

>This is, of course, yet another lie that must be told to justify what is a deeply evil system

Yours is, of course, a misleading statement cherry picked from all available data to spread unfounded beliefs.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/roiw.12364

[2] http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/mobility_trends_publish...

[3] https://voxeu.org/article/what-s-your-surname-intergeneratio...

> A simple experiment you can do yourself is take the lists of Forbes 400 riches over time

I'm not sure what you imagine this proves. Social mobility is something that has been well studied in America. It is well-known that social mobility is over in the United States. A simple visit to Wikipedia will set this straight -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_....

> Yours is, of course, a misleading statement cherry picked from all available data to spread unfounded beliefs.

Frankly this entire thread is you leaping from one myth to another. Now you seem to be clinging to this myth that there is high firm competition and social mobility in the US. This is not supported by any of recent research. All of the recent research shows that there is far less competitiveness across firms and that net social mobility has collapsed.

>Frankly this entire thread is you leaping from one myth to another.

You claimed a paper about Florence had wider applicability than it does, by ignoring what the authors specifically wrote to make your claim. I quoted the statement from your own paper contradicting your claims and I presented more recent papers on the US that show you're incorrect.

So I don't think I'm the one making mythical leaps.

>All of the recent research shows that there is far less competitiveness across firms and that net social mobility has collapsed.

I just cited one of the most cited paper in this area, the Raj Chetty one, and it directly contradicts your statement. Did you look at it? They had unprecedented access to all US taxpayer records, making their study vastly more comprehensive than anything before (and since as far as I can tell). They analyzed every single person in the US income for the period in question. You're not going to get a much better dataset than that.

>I'm not sure what you imagine this proves.

It is evidence for the claim this started with: the rich get poorer, where you take some definition of wealth, take all people in that group, and see what happens to them over time. One such metric is the top X people, and demonstrating that they do not remain is one data point showing this statement true. I've yet to see a dataset for which you can answer this statement that does not support. The Forbes 400 is a particularly easy one for anyone to check.

Or simply google what percentage of millionaires or billionaires are first gen, and again you'll see most wealthy are new, not inherited.

So, do you have any dataset showing for everyone of some level of wealth in the US, that over time that same set of people don't regress to mean? I've just given several places showing exactly this.

>net social mobility has collapsed

FRED, Raj, BLS, and Census disagree. Even your Wiki link states "A large academic study released in 2014 found US mobility overall has not changed appreciably in the last 25 years ".

I don't think the word "collapsed" means "has remained fairly constant".