On average, if you were poor in the 80's you're poorer now. Some of your poor cohort aren't as poor, and some have lifted themselves out of poverty entirely. Yet more of them are doing worse than they were.
That's bad, right? It's a problem you'd like to see fixed, yes? And it certainly is what the statistic means.
That's exactly what it means, though. If you hold an investment for a long time, the returns compound. So your wealth grows exponentially.
Conversely, for the poor (debtors, really), compound interest works against you. For example, a college graduate could have an income-based repayment plan and see their student loan balance grow, because of the compounding interest. One of my friends on social media posted about this horror in their financial life this recently.
Do some wealthy people lose everything? Sure, lottery ticket winners often do. Do some poor people ascend to the 1%? Yes, many immigrants of modest means come to the USA and found successful companies within the United States (proportionally, when compared to citizens born here).
But the takeaway of increasing income inequality is very real. A small silver lining: The U.S. middle class is shrinking, but that's because a good number are moving into the upper middle class, depending on where you draw the lines between "middle class" and "upper middle class". Using inflation-adjusted dollars, more households bring in $100k than just two decades ago.
You concede the point and then post a hypothetical that's not relevant.
And that hypothetical (meritocratic social mobility) is even dubious.
We've gone from approximately a 12:1 ratio for 1%:50% to about a 150:-1 ratio. -1!
> This follows from 30 years in which the top 1 percent massively grew their net worth while the bottom half saw a slight decline in its net worth.
The "top 1%" and "bottom half" are categories, not entities. They are made up of different people in 1989 and 2019, not the same people getting richer and poorer respectively. The author wants you to imagine a bunch of rich people having more and more money each year, and poorer people having less and less. This is not what the statistic means.