Comment by arjie
5 days ago
This one has always made sense to me. If you think about circumstances which improve the bottom quintiles’ relative income so that they’re now making as much as the median (I.e. the curve flattens out through unprecedented prosperity for the poorest) then the middle and upper middle incomes will rightly conclude that they’re not relatively high income anymore.
Placing an arbitrary person on the curve at the right place will show their relative position on this.
There’s a reason a large amount of the complaints are things like “my DoorDash is so much more expensive” and “my insta cart bill is so much higher”.
In the ideal state for the text writing middle and upper middle class, the mostly video consuming lower classes make very little money and provide services for cheap.
One should expect that enriching the poor upsets those whose relative wealth/income is no longer as high as it used to be. I imagine we could test this by comparing p75, p90 to p10 and p50
For my part I am optimistic. So many things today are so much cheaper and better than they used to be. Looking forward to the future - with the one caveat that AI is the precipitous ridge we must walk.
This is a very zero sum view of the world that I don't think most people actually hold.
I don't think people need to hold a specific view. The experience of higher income percentiles is that the goods and services they rely on will get more expensive. Their position will be against a generic economic term, inflation, not against any individuals and awareness of other income percentiles will be limited. People at each position on the percentile curve will simply experience what they are experiencing and assume it is occurring to others as well.
Hmm, this is tougher than I thought to tease out. You can get income decile/tercile level sentiment but the problem is getting out workers vs. retirees etc. It would make sense that fixed-income earners would experience distress if worker incomes rose so I need to pull out that set but I can't find a way to do it. But this should be a massive smoking gun and I don't see the gun smoking that much. Sentiment for high-income mostly seems to just match the S&P500 and interest rates... I think it was a good idea but it's not true.