Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

DoingIsLearning

As a European I feel like I have a lot of safety and guarantees.

I also have children and I obviously worry a great deal about what the world will look like when they grow up.

Whatever is happening at the moment has been set in motion in the past 15 years in this slow tectonic movement towards a likely repetition of past history. In that context there seems to be a huge information /misinformation/propaganda/psy ops operation happen under our feet.

The wake up call for me was during the past US presidential campaign. I heard in my social circle (three separate) under 25 yr old males (all raised and living in social-democratic Central Europe) repeating tiktok/instagram talking points, about how Trump "...will be good for 'the economy' ".

In light of past interesting discussion in HN, I ask the question:

How can we as citizens contribute to counter this? And how can governance / intelligence counter act something that now appears unstoppable and entrenched?

> "...will be good for 'the economy' "

"The economy" in the US does not mean "jobs" or "the general public" or "the middle class" or "workers" or "people who live in your town/city/region" or "the general public's savings/ standard-of-living". It means "the stock holdings and assets of the top ~20(-40)% richest".

The top 10% of Americans held 93% * of all stocks, while the bottom 50% only 1%, as of 1/2024. (* It was only 70% back in 2019 [2]. That's a huge 5-year change.)

(In 3Q/2024, the bottom 50% of households held $4.8T real estate assets + just $0.3T stocks. The top 1%, by comparison, held over $16T stocks + $6T real estate assets.)

[0]: Scott Galloway (Prof G) keeps talking about this distribution of wealth and why it's structurally dangerous to the US.

[1]: "The Richest 1 Percent Own a Greater Share of the Stock Market Than Ever Before" (1/2024) https://inequality.org/article/stock-ownership-concentration...

[2]: Here's an older USAFacts on 2019 Fed data: https://usafacts.org/articles/what-percentage-of-americans-o...

Does this account for defined benefit plan pension fund holdings, especially taxpayer funded DB pensions? Does it also allocate to individuals the equity held in accounts like state 529 plans, 401k, HSA, 403b, and other types of tax advantaged accounts? Or, for example, Norway’s sovereign fund?

Seems like a non trivial task to divvy up the beneficial ownership of equities. Plus, I would expect older people to have more savings, so there would need to be a normalization for age, presumably.

Edit: Looks like the source is here:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/index...

> The DFAs integrate two data products produced by the Federal Reserve Board: the Financial Accounts of the United States, which provide quarterly data on aggregate balance sheets of major sectors of the U.S. economy, and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), which provides comprehensive triennial microdata on the assets and liabilities of a representative sample of U.S. households.

Diving more into this data seems time intensive, so I guess I’ll just take the Fed’s word for it.

Yes AFAIK the Fed data includes people's retirement plans. People's retirement plans issue them a statement; I don't see why we need to divvy up the estimated beneficial ownership.

(Defined Benefit pensions are pretty rare in the US; in March 2023, only 15% of private industry workers had access to a defined benefit pension plan, and only 11% participated in such plans; mostly govt and local workers. Hence, the Fed data averages are deceptive; ~85% of people have no DB, 15% or fewer. So if they graphed those two separate subpopulations, we'd see more representative numbers for people who spent most of their working lives working for govt + everyone else.)

(Why would you expect US Fed data on US residents to have anything to do with Norway’s sovereign fund? There are comparatively few Norwegians in the US and even fewer retirees living in the US who spent most of their life working in Norway; approximate as zero.)

Yes, obviously older people have more savings, things compound. Also their retirement plans may have historically had more generous provisions/matches. And they got to invest in previous boom cycles. And historically real-estate tended to go up not down, most of the time.

> Why would you expect US Fed data on US residents to have anything to do with Norway’s sovereign fund?

It is unclear if 93% of all stocks owned by Americans are owned by the richest 10% of Americans, or if 93% of all stocks traded in the US are owned by the richest 10% of Americans.

The defined benefit plan beneficial ownership is actually more so all taxpayers (since most are government employees), since they are on the hook for the benefits of the equity investments don’t live up to the expected returns. This would impact everyone via higher taxes, although exactly who and how much is up to politics.

I guess my point is the whole of society kind of has its eggs in the public equities basket.

I'd start by getting a better social circle. I have zero patience for white supremacy. I fired a lot of friends over the past decade.

On a less immediate note, issues of greed are likely countered by generosity, so volunteering is good. Read what every religion has to say about that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43559605

*shrug, You sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Be the change you want to see in the world etc etc. This is an age-old issue, what to do about shitty people in your support group.

> about how Trump "...will be good for 'the economy' ".

I wonder how they're taking the current economic news...

As a citizen, your best bet is to educate yourself cultivate good judgment and speak the truth so you get the respect and trust of your circle. So that even people that disagree with you still take your opinion seriously. And realize that people have always believed in bullshit so you need to be realistic in your ambitions and be patient rather than upset when someone is wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com