Comment by teamonkey
1 day ago
Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but…
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/
“for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.”
“If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.”
Etc.
> by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP
Those things are measured in different units, which automatically throws doubt on the ability of the source to be statistically rigorous in any other way.
One is measured in pounds. The other is measured in pounds. Seems pretty comparable.
If you're being deliberately stupid you could pretend it's a comparison between pounds and pounds per year, but everyone who is at least minimally literate in the subject understands that "GDP" here means "the amount of value produced in a year".
The super rich aren't the problem. 200 families is too few to have any meaningful effect on the housing market.
By all means tax them til their eyes bleed, but it'll mostly just make people feel better rather than being a useful contribution to public finances.
They own a lot of UK property and land, both directly and through trusts. And given the statistic that the top 50 families control half of the UK’s total wealth, I’m not sure how you can say it wouldn’t have an impact on either tax revenues or property prices. A land tax of 0.1% would have a staggering impact on tax revenues.
It might affect agricultural land prices. Indeed that's at the heart of the farming IHT controversy (farming land is effectively overpriced relative to its business or utility value, because of its previously far too generous IHT treatment). It won't affect the price of houses, because it's not 200 rich families hogging the supply.
50 families controlling half the country's wealth is a bit of a stretch. The top 50 individuals have an average net worth of maybe $4-5Bn, giving a total wealth of $250Bn. Half the country's _land_ seems more likely?
Meanwhile there are literally millions of £1M+ houses owned by relatively ordinary people, millions of Boomers and some older GenX with at least £0.5m in their pension funds, and so on.
Land tax of 0.1% would be a good thing, but it'd be equivalent to putting about a third on council tax (£1k/year on a £1m home, currently council tax is about £3k in that bracket I think?). A useful step certainly but not revolutionary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
Very little change in U.K. over 20 years
It looks to me like Equality Trust put a fair amount of thought and research into their website, did their best to paint a picture of what's going on in the UK by using multiple reputable sources, and tried to explain why that picture is dire, not just for those with a net worth that rounds to £0 but for the nation at large, with several dozen citations to back that up.
Thank God we have this one number from some Credit Suisse marketing material to invalidate all of that.
Gini is a very rough tool. It’s trying to describe the shape of a curve with a single number. It describes the average inequality between any two people.
The curve can be skewed without the Gini number changing significantly if, say, the bottom 99% became increasingly more equal in income/wealth by becoming poorer overall, transferring income/wealth to the upper 1%.
I the numbers maybe not, but in the public perception? In society?
Perception in solicit is we should take people in £200k or £800k a year a lot more and leaver those with £100m in assets alone.
We’re up in arms when people block roads to highlight problems with climate change, but when millionaires get worried they’ll have less of a loophole with tax, we’re supporting it in droves.
Highly unlikely because the rich are now just running away from UK pulling all their cash with them; it's likely that leftists will get what they want - reduction of wealth inequality - just not in the way that pleases them: with the cash being simply gone.
Sounds good to me. The problem is the rich don't actually take their money and fuck off, they just keep owning wealth here forever. I expect that won't change until the UK gets an actual leftist government, which seems unlikely to happen in the next 10 years.