Who is in control of the United States of America? Who makes the decisions to go to war, to provide (or deny) health care, create tax loopholes, and create budgets?
It’s not the 1%. If it was the 1%, that would be a figure that we all might be able to understand and accept. It’s not even the .1%. , it’s the .01% and that number is so small, it’s difficult to relate to.
Try this at your next BBQ/Summer Gathering to illustrate how small the minority is that is controlling the government, the media, the election process, and who has taken all the gains in wealth in the past 40 years.
We’ll assume that all in attendance graduated from a typical US high school. The average graduating class size is about 1,000 seniors. With a show of hands, ask how many people recall a billionaire or multimillionaire that attended their last class reunion.
If it was 1%, everyone in attendance would be able to list ten billionaires or multimillionaires. If there were 25 people at the BBQ, that’s 250 individuals that your gathering could name.
If it was .1%, there would be 25 names.
But it’s not even as large as .1%, it’s .01%. That means at a gathering of 25 of your friends, maybe two or three names could be recalled out of the 25,000 people in the survey size. Of course, the odds are higher if your BBQ is in a wealthy suburb and lower (to the point of nonexistent) if your event is in a middle class or poor area.
Note that as of 2011, the average net worth of a member of the US House of Representatives was $6.6 million. For Senators, the figure was $14 million. The median for congress in 2012 was just over $1 million.They do know which side their bread is buttered on. A few, even among the wealthiest, are reliable advocates for the rest of us. Most are not. Also note that Democrats are no less likely to be much more wealthy than most of us.
My “net worth” including my house and 401K etc is probably a million and I’m a nobody. We’re not talking about a million or even ten million. The “entry fee” is $110 Million.
Those Senators and Reps are still sitting at the kid’s table at this banquet.
Even his basic math is wrong, which makes this whole article suspect. He says the top .01% is 16,000 people.
The US Census Bureau says there are about 320 million Americans. If you know how to divide by powers of 10, it’s obvious that .01% is some number starting with 32, and in fact it’s 32,000. He just randomly cuts out half the group he’s talking about. Such a major and fundamental error puts the whole thing in doubt.
The US Census Bureau also says that in 2012, there were 180,456 people between 21 and 64 years of age.
That number results in 18,045 people.
Perhaps your bias makes you overly eager to deny reality.
Only 23.3% of the population is under 18. So about 245 million adults. So the number should be 24,000 if you exclude children.
I don’t know about johntmay. I’m happy to stipulate that the number is between the original figure of 16,000 and your figure of 24,000 (or even your initially incorrect figure of 32,000).
The point of the thread remains. Even at 24,000, it’s a vanishingly small portion of the population. One of the things engineers like me learn to do is ignore precision that doesn’t influence the problem at hand. If you’re dividing a quantity by the difference between 1 and the square root of a number that exponentially approaches 1, you don’t need to carry the calculation to four decimal places to know that the result is effectively infinite. If you know that a new bridge can withstand 10,000 times its maximum expected load without failing, then 9,999 is just as safe.
There’s nothing wrong with the “basic math” of anything presented here.
The children of the very wealthy generally don’t attend public schools.
The exercise is more interesting when applied to a reunion of, say, Phillps Exeter Academy or Pingree School. That group will be dominated by members of the 1% (the annual tuition of Pingree is $40,750).
I strongly suspect that the exercise would still result in 2-3 “hits”.
The intuition of most people about the reality of today’s wealth concentration is woefully incorrect (and well-cultivated by our mass media and government to stay that way).
This is why the progressive populist agenda of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is so very important to our future.
Yes, I agree. My example, however, was intend as a “parlor game” of sorts to illustrate at a family or friends gathering. By the way, I am headed to the Lyme Connecticut area for a vacation in a few weeks and I think that I’d get 5-10 “hits” at a few functions I will be at.
…how do we remedy that? In other words, I would love to get to the point where our public schools ARE considered worthy and excellent options even for those who could easily afford something else.
That would be the best education reform you can hope for. We already know of the Finnish example which is standardized test free and egalitarian. Class stratification is significantly smaller there anyway thanks to social democratic economics, but there is still class integration within the public schools, which have more resources to equip students coming in from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As Diane Ravitch frequently points out, concentrated poverty is the single biggest reason for the black/white achivement gap, the latino/white achievement gap, and ‘failing’ inner city schools. If the neighborhoods and local economies are failures, it’s pretty hard for even the best and brightest teachers to overcome those odds.
When I tutored at CPS (Chicago not Cambridge), class sizes of 35 and stop and frisk in the hallways made it next to impossible for these kids to feel anything other than prisoners in an overcrowded pen. And while the school violence was a real problem, large enough for President Obama to personally intervene in the school, there was no need to treat the kids this way and issue suspensions for minor infractions. The teachers barely had time to control the class and get a 10 minute lesson out, and I and other U of C students were sent in as backup to basically help the already college bound students stay on track. It was deemed the most effective ‘use’ of our ‘services’ by CPS.