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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people love to throw around the word "shareholders" like it's a pejorative. The word seems to carry connotations of greedy old Uncle Scrooge, Uncle Pennybags, or some spoiled Saudi Prince. That's a highly distorted view.

Lots of "shareholders" are people's retirement funds, pensions, and the like. When those funds finally pay out, they get taxed as income just like for everybody else.

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Even including stocks owned through retirement and pension funds, 84% of stocks are owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and roughly half of all households have exactly $0 invested in the market.

Saying that Uncle Scrooge and his buddies own all the stocks is not much worse than implying that normal people own a significant share of the market through their retirement accounts.

Most stocks hold by Americans are owned by the top 10%. Unfortunately this libertarian trickle down fantasy of trickle down economics is not correct.

This is a stupid argument. Say we have 100 people in our economy, 90 of them $50k, 9 of them make $200k, and 1 person makes 1 million. Everyone invests 10% of their income in 'stoks' which cost $5/each.

Each of the 90 people invest $5k and have 1000 stoks.

Each of the 9 people invest $20k and have 4000 stoks.

The millionaire invests $100k and has 20,000 stoks.

The top 10% have 99.96% of the stoks.

It would be weird if the richest people didn't own most of the stocks. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem.

So you don’t see the problem in your little example?

Except it's not 10%, or 1%. It's stats like "3 hedge fund makers make more than 140,000 teachers". The problem isn't disparity, it's the absolute mind boggling nature of it.

Yeah his example is comical in the sense that it kind of shows the nature of the problem.

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