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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Inequality isn't the cause of our problems in the US. It's basically the same as it was in the 90s https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

Inequality in general is a complaint that is most often heard from people making 6 figures complaining about billionaires, but you don't actually hear it from the "poorly educated masses of people without access to the gold" as you put it.

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You can quote statistics to show that "inequality is the same", but that's obviously not the case. To wit, Bill Gates became the richest person in the '90s with wealth of $13 billion. There are now 10 people with more than $100 billion each. Meanwhile inflation since 1990 has been only 2.5x.

The richest individuals have an order of magnitude more wealth, and you can't say this is inconsequential when the richest person in the world (net worth $300b+) is actively leading the effort to dismantle US government institutions.

Yes, your anecdote about one person out of 300 million has convinced me that the statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve about the entire population are clearly incorrect.

Perception is politics.

I disagree. Inequality is very much at the root of our problems.

But killing the golden goose will not help solve the inequality, but only make it worse by making it even more expensive and difficult to get into universities with top research programs.

Gini coefficient may be the most commonly used statistic but it is not sensitive to current conditions in the US (https://www.investopedia.com/news/measuring-inequality-forge...). The palma ratio does indeed show increasing inequality since the 90s (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/palma-ratio-s90s40-ratio?...). Also wealth inequality is another place to be looking, especially if you're familiar with Piketty's body of work which points at it specifically (https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wealth-distribution-in-amer...).

You know what they say about lies and statistics.

‘An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.’

Plutarch

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