From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 12 2003 - 10:48:09 MDT
More data:
http://www.policyideas.org/Issues/Social_Economic/Household_Wealth.pdf
Wealth distribution per family, from US Census data. Nice exponential
distribution... the bottom 40% averages $1,100 [sic] in net worth, vs. $10m
for the top 1%, or $61,000 in the middle 20%.
And so, why do we care? The politics and economics of envy:
http://www.thismagazine.ca/current_issue/f_6.html
Worth reading in full. Notes some economics experiments where people are
willing to burn their own money to destroy someone else's, and pull them down.
Irrational? They seem to do this more to people with unearned wealth, who'd
gotten big sums straight from the experimenters as opposed to playing the game
well. Also claims a trickle-down effect of spending, where if rewards such as
jobs (or sex) or handed out partly because of style, you may be forced to try
to match the style of those richer than you
-xx- Damien X-)
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