Comment by arrowsmith 14 hours ago
What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.
14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer.
The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.
> Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts.
Is that supposed to prove me wrong? I said that everybody is getting poorer.
> Wealth inequality is through the roof.
Wealth inequality, while high, is still roughly where it was in 2007. (Source: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/)
> If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving
I said it's a problem, not the problem. And it's not just the ultra-rich who are leaving, but vast swathes of the middle classes. Many poor people would leave too if they had the means.
You and the other replier seem to think I'm defending the status quo. How on earth did I imply that? You think I think it's a good thing for the entire country to get poorer?
"Wealth inequality, while high, is still roughly where it was in 2007"
This is not whats represented in the source you cited?
In the graph titled "Top 10% and Bottom 50% Wealth Shares in The UK 1900-2020" you can clearly see the wealth owned by the top 10% increased from 54.4% in 2007 to 57% in 2020 and likely even higher now 5 years later.
Yes, that's only a 2.6% increase. I don't think it's unfair to call that "roughly where it was".
In fact, according to that chart wealth inequality today is much lower than it was in the 1970s, although it increased throughout the 1990s.
The same link shows that the UK has unremarkable wealth inequality by the standards of developed countries: we're bang in the middle of the OECD, with lower levels of wealth inequality than Sweden, Denmark, Finland or Norway. (That's funny, I thought the Nordics were egalitarian utopias?)
I'm not saying that wealth inequality is low, or that it's not a problem. I'm merely responding to the claim that "wealth inequality is through the roof", which I take to mean that wealth inequality has increased substantially in recent years. As far as I can tell that's not true.
Personally I think we need more economic growth, not more taxes. We already have the highest taxes since WWII, soon to be the highest taxes in the entire history of the UK, and all it's doing is strangling the economy and making productive people flee.
The statistics they provide are the result of self-reporting by people they interview, and they themselves talk at length about the challenges and errors that may exist in their data and sampling: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...
I think this is inherently going to be a poor way to get an accurate representation of wealth inequality, because if you ask a bunch of really wealthy people worth $100mm+ how much money and assets they have, and especailly when these are very privacy focused people, they're going to either:
1. decline to respond in any way
2. if they do respond, they are very likely to misrepresent and downplay their wealth
3. very likely to have wealth that isn't UK based and therefore wouldn't disclose it to anyone for any reason
4. have a lot of very valuable things, like owning a private businesses, that may not necessarily have a price tag attached to them, and so therefore hard to represent when asked "how much money do you have?"
even though reports throughout years would always have this same issue, i think the problem is that as wealth for the 0.1% rises, that rise is not going to get well represented or collected
If only our problems could be reduced to a single "the".
Go get an airbnb in a poor suburb for a few weeks and live there, talk to people, and ask them if they think they're more or less equal with other Britons in the last 15 years. Show them your Gini coefficient and see what they think of it. Ask them if they feel the income distribution has been flattened in a way that favours them.
The rich people living here for the last 40 years all leaving does not bother most people. In fact, it's cause for celebration. They're leeches who don't pay tax on their piles of cash held in off-shore accounts - they just drive up the price of everything, particularly property. Meanwhile there are plenty of people trying to get here from the US to replace them who understand the purpose of capital is to put it to work and create jobs, not stare at it on a screen.
Your kind of thinking is not unusual within centre right politics, but it's also why nationalist populism is a credible threat. Farage is currently favourite with most bookmakers to be next PM because of the kind of defence of Tory policy you're making. Please think on that.
Me: "The Tories made everyone poorer!"
You: "How dare you defend the Tories?"
Learn to read.
The major change to income levels has been the massive increase in minimum wage. This removes the incentive to work hard and get skills because they aren’t valued, especially outside of London.
The other major change is the continual divergence of wealth.
If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with parents while you save a 100k deposit (which using things like LISAs).
By the time you’re in your early 30s you have a decent paying job, have met a partner with a similar income, and can buy a house and repeat the cycle.
If you don’t you get the same job but have to pay rent to someone else’s parents, and you never get that deposit, so you’re trapped in the rent cycle.
Shocking how similar the fates of the US and the UK are similar. I’m in my 30s and the divergence is starting to become extremely stark between people who had middle class financially supportive parents and those who didn’t.
Kids who’s parents who are well off but wouldn’t pay for college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked out of the housing market. For most of my generation, there is little opportunity, only gatekeeping.
> Kids [whose] parents who are well off but wouldn’t pay for college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked out of the housing market.
That can’t be a particularly large set. Parents well off is already a small minority case and only a minority of that small minority won’t give support to their kids.
For people in that tiny sliver, I’m sure it feels bad but it doesn’t seem like a solution that works for other “starting from zero” young adults would need changes to also work for this set.
If you want to support your child at university in the UK, there's a particular band of middle-class income where you get the worst of both worlds. You make too much to get certain kinds of government support, but you don't make enough that you can comfortably make up the difference.
If you want to put multiple children through uni then it can get very burdensome.
One of many ways in which our system is regressive.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US (20+ years ago), the metrics used to determine "well off" for the purposes of receiving lower prices for higher education had nothing to do with the parents' wealth, and only their income, with no accounting for assets and number of other children, not to mention jobs without access to subsidized healthcare and/or healthcare costs, etc.
In my case, immigrant parents just started earning a little money around the time I go to college, which means I don't qualify for any assistance, parents don't have enough money to pay for my college, nor would I want them to as it would hurt their ability to support my grandparents and my younger sister, so I am taking out loans at full price.
Using income as a proxy for wealth has screwed the middle/upper middle for such a long time, and the actually rich love it (can throw in the nonsense that is earned income taxes here).
We've also seen a huge compression in net income as the tax thresholds haven't kept up with inflation. So someone who paid a 20% marginal rate twenty years ago is now paying 40% on the same real-terms income. And the 0% personal allowance has been eroded too.
Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between £100k and £125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and that's not even counting employee's NICs.
And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is employer's NICs. (Those were just increased even further, and the morons are all defending it by pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do they think the employer gets the money from?)
Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can actually reduce your net income. E.g. there are situations in which increasing your salary by £1 can leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.
What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at least have something to show for it in the public sector, but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of my blood pressure.
You’re looking at the wrong numbers. Wealth, not income. Wealth inequality is through the roof. Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts.
If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book would be a starting point.