Median US Income is Three Metres a Year
July 25, 2020 11:10 AM   Subscribe

Tom Scott visualises a million dollars vs a billion dollars in a one-dimensional way. (SLYT)

00:00 Introduction
02:14 Leaving Dagenham
06:03 A13 Eastbound
12:43 Mar Dyke Interchange
14:26 A282
16:07 Queen Elizabeth II Bridge
20:50 A2 Eastbound
30:16 M2 Eastbound
53:36 Thanet Way Eastbound
1:08:09 A28 towards Margate
1:12:09 Local roads towards Margate
1:14:39 Ah good, the sea
1:17:29 Conclusion
posted by lucidium (25 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Jeff Bezos gains money at peppy jog of ~9km/hr, he's currently travelled roughly the distance from London to Auckland.

The richest 1% hold enough wealth to go to the Moon and come back 20 times, and then go back to the Moon one more time.
posted by lucidium at 11:35 AM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]


I just couldn't get over how fast he was hitting those speed bumps. I winced every time.
posted by pipeski at 11:49 AM on July 25, 2020 [1 favorite]


For capitalists, the speedbumps are people!
posted by klanawa at 11:51 AM on July 25, 2020 [25 favorites]




Similarly, mathowie linked today to a Twitter thread that laid out the ramifications of trying to SPEND $1 billion.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:23 PM on July 25, 2020 [8 favorites]


The beauty of metric: If the thickness of a dollar bill is 0.1 mm, then $10,000 in dollar bills would be 1 metre thick, $1 million would be 100 metres, and $1 billion would be 100 km.
posted by russilwvong at 12:58 PM on July 25, 2020 [8 favorites]


So, my life can be represented by a rapidly reversing car?
posted by greenhornet at 2:47 PM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]


I always think these kinds of visualizations focus on the wrong thing.
Like, I don't care if there are rich people, I don't even care if there are very rich people.
Lots of people are richer than me, either through hard work or luck.
I'm ok with that.

What'd I like to see is a visualization of how much of a fair share they contribute to the society/government.
Warren Buffet has that famous anecdote where he says he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Figure out a catchy way to show that, demonstrate how doubling the tax rate on the richest of the rich will basically have zero effect on extreme fortunes, illustrate the percentage of my income that goes to keeping the system running vs. the percentage of someone making a 1000 times my income.
posted by madajb at 3:25 PM on July 25, 2020 [18 favorites]


I think seeing that, madajb, would just make me blindly/impotently enraged.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:43 PM on July 25, 2020 [3 favorites]


Here's some graphs showing before-tax and after-tax inequality in the US, from the Tax Policy Institute - in particular, see Figure 3 and Figure 6, which break out the top 1% and top 0.1% income shares. Before-tax inequality has risen sharply, especially at the very top. After-tax inequality is a bit lower, but not by much.

The obvious response would be to raise taxes at the very top. Analysis of Biden's tax proposals from the Tax Policy Institute.

What's causing the rise in before-tax inequality? Robert Frank says that an increasing number of markets are winner-take-all. Paul Krugman talks about the specific problem of monopoly rents. Roger Martin points to a problem with stock-based executive compensation: the CEO has a fair amount of control over the expectations reflected in the stock price.
posted by russilwvong at 4:51 PM on July 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


I think seeing that, madajb, would just make me blindly/impotently enraged.

Hopefully, it would enrage a lot of people!

I'm just not convinced people really care how much richer the rich really are, after all, we are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

But I do think people get really pissed when they think someone is getting a free ride, and if some smart person could come up with a way to easily envision how much of a free ride the wealthy really get, I believe it would catch on in a way that "Eat the Rich" just doesn't.
posted by madajb at 5:39 PM on July 25, 2020 [4 favorites]


The richest 1% hold enough wealth to go to the Moon and come back 20 times, and then go back to the Moon one more time.

This sounds like an excellent plan. We could simplify it a fair bit and cut the cost considerably by just leaving out the first 40 trips, though.
posted by flabdablet at 1:06 AM on July 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


I don't care if there are rich people, I don't even care if there are very rich people.
Lots of people are richer than me, either through hard work or luck.
I'm ok with that.


I'm OK with it to a point. And that point is well short of the kind of inequality we see in the world today.

The trouble with having insanely rich people as a structural feature of the way we're organized is that (a) you need to be insane to want to stay that rich and (b) the power that insane wealth allows you to wield makes that selfsame insanity end up exerting a grossly disproportionate degree of influence on the way society operates. To a really good first approximation, the things that the free market allocates resources to are the things that the wealthiest participants want resources allocated to.

With the degree of influence I've been watching the insanely wealthy and the larger cohort of insanely-wealthy-wannabes trailing in their wake exert over the last forty years, it's no surprise to me at all that we're so far behind where we need to be on addressing climate change, resource overconsumption, biodiversity loss and pandemics.

The nuff-nuffs who run the joint (and not, it's not a conspiracy if they're doing it in plain sight) are so insulated from the concerns of ordinary people that they find chi-chi bored-rich-kid bullshit like colonizing Mars or futile quests for immortality via personal uploading more appealing than learning how to guarantee that Spaceship Earth will never need to be escaped from.

The desperation with which the ultra-rich cling to their illusion of inherent superiority is just sad.
posted by flabdablet at 1:28 AM on July 26, 2020 [10 favorites]


We don't have pound notes any more and my net worth (mortgage-free house owner), lined up in fivers is a depressingly short walk.
posted by epo at 2:02 AM on July 26, 2020


A while ago there were some studies that showed that humans tend to think logarithmically instead of linearly when visualizing large numbers. To someone with a thousand dollars, a million dollars intuitively feels roughly half-way to a million dollars, because the ratios of a billion to a million and a million to a thousand are the same. So it's somewhat counterintuitive to find out exactly how much a billion really is. People's ability to think about large timescales would be affected by this as well, which has implications for things like climate change. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard or read someone blow off climate change because "CO2 levels were higher a million years ago" as if that isn't very a fucking long time. Although, if people naturally think in logarithms, it's funny that they can't grasp exponential growth.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 2:22 AM on July 26, 2020


> What'd I like to see is a visualization of how much of a fair share they contribute to the society/government.

I'm picturing ten thousand people stuck in a hole with a handful of ladders that are not tall enough, and one guy at the beach with a yacht full of climbing equipment.
posted by lucidium at 3:28 AM on July 26, 2020


fwiw, a couple earlier:
-How big is a billion?
-Wealth shown to scale
posted by kliuless at 3:47 AM on July 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


Warren Buffet has that famous anecdote where he says he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

My opinion would be that calculating this would be a huge waste of time, as 1) people don't even understand marginal rates, 2) rate is different than total tax, and people would argue that the rate is less important than the total tax (which Buffet would be paying more of even at a lower rate). The average person who we would hope would be sensitive to such an argument would feel that is correct (rate falls as total amount rises).

But I do think people get really pissed when they think someone is getting a free ride

No they actually don't, not really. They only get pissed when people who get less than them get a free ride. See again rates vs total amount vs marginal tax rates. Also, suburbia shows us 'free ride' legitimately means 'free'. If they are paying anything, even a tiny amount way less than cost, that's different in their minds.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:49 AM on July 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


The intrinsic unfairness of the current system notwithstanding, I've often heard it said that raising taxes on the rich would have little impact on total tax revenues.

Recommended links to studies that provide credible arguments for or against this proposition?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:15 AM on July 26, 2020


But I do think people get really pissed when they think someone is getting a free ride

No they actually don't, not really. They only get pissed when people who get less than them get a free ride.


While I agree in the main with both these responses, I think this downplays the inherent racism in the whole "who gets a free ride" concept.

I'm going to refer y'all again to Dying of Whiteness, which illustrates, better than anything I could ever come up with, how deeply white people have bought into the whole racial hierarchy and will literally choose death over letting a black or brown person come near them, economically speaking.

(If anything, I think this book is way more generous to the white supremacists than it needs to be, but I guess that's a hazard of doing ethnographic research where you're supposed to set aside your own thoughts/ideas/biases and focus on the voices of your research participants. Kind of just wish Metzl had been willing to acknowledge his own white privilege in getting these stories out of people, and then writing this book.)
posted by basalganglia at 6:33 AM on July 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


Recommended links to studies that provide credible arguments for or against this proposition?

Robert Reich Salon article:

Myth 9: If taxes are raised on the wealthy, they’ll find ways to evade them. So very little money is going to be raised.

More rubbish. For example, a 2 percent wealth tax, as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, would raise around 2.75 trillion dollars over the next decade with very little tax evasion, according to research. A 70 percent tax on incomes over 10 million would raise close to 720 billion dollars over 10 years.


The article references the Saez-Zucman research at the Brookings Institute. (PDF)
posted by JDC8 at 10:13 AM on July 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


For example, a 2 percent wealth tax, as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, would raise around 2.75 trillion dollars over the next decade with very little tax evasion, according to research. A 70 percent tax on incomes over 10 million would raise close to 720 billion dollars over 10 years.

It is pretty trivial. We've blown through more money in the last three months on coronavirus mitigation than these taxes are claimed to collect in the next 10 years.

Trying to recover money from the rich is a difficult task. If you have 70% tax, then a person with a $100 million income is willing to pay $70 million dollars a year to high end tax lawyers to avoid taxes. If you think a $60,000 IRS auditor stands a chance against $70 million of top lawyers, you are dreaming. It doesn't mean we should try harder, but raising top marginal rates just makes the task more difficult.

As economist Dean Baker argues in his free book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer the easiest way to get money from the rich is preventing them from getting it in the first place.

Rules like intellectual property laws, financial transaction taxes, corporate governance, trade deals and fiscal and monetary policies are rigged to make people at the top rich.

The rules of the economy are rigged to transfer money from the bottom to those at the top. If you change those rules, you won't have the inequality we have today. Taxing after the fact is an effort with diminishing returns.
posted by JackFlash at 11:01 AM on July 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


For example, a 2 percent wealth tax, as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren

Do note that that isn't exactly the policy analyzed:
The tax would be 2% on the net worth above $50 million with an additional 1% tax on net worth above $1 billion.
And while, sure 50 million net worth is definitely rich, it's nowhere near the billion mark; as the video suggests, it's the difference between walking and driving a car. And similar to how a billion is a lot longer than a million, there are way more 50-millionaires than billionaires. It shows up clearly in the USB PDF:
75,000 American households (less than 0.1%) would be liable for the wealth tax and that the tax would raise around $2.75 trillion over the ten-year budget window 2019-2028, of which $0.3 trillion would come from the billionaire 1% surtax
So the first tax raises 10x the cash of the surtax. Which is pretty impressive considering how much more money a billionaire has. I don't even recall Warren proposing a 2 percent wealth tax on 50-millionaires, so I guess that fig leaf billionaire surtax worked as intended.

Trying to recover money from the rich is a difficult task. If you have 70% tax, then a person with a $100 million income is willing to pay $70 million dollars a year to high end tax lawyers to avoid taxes.

And more to the point, you'd definitely be funding opponents in primaries and general elections. And if you already happened to have a political career as mayor of NYC, maybe you'll just run yourself by golly.
posted by pwnguin at 12:08 PM on July 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


I was going to make a similar point to L.P. Hatecraft, which I think gets sort of lost in these visualizations. At a certain point the sheer immensity of the difference stops making sense, and I feel like putting it in the register of distance doesn’t necessarily get that across. If you just start with the very basic point that, regardless of what you’re making, if you were making twice that, your life would likely significantly change. If you don’t think in terms of doubling that double, but simply in terms of tripling, once again, significantly different. If you’re talking to the majority of people and you put it in these terms, say the difference between 30k, 60k, and 90k a year, the incomprehensible difference that billions make becomes more tangible in their intangibility: they stop making sense.
If you really want to piss people off though, just start talking to people about work in the physics sense and watch them regress to some sort of mishmash of eugenics and meritocracy
posted by LeviQayin at 6:09 PM on July 26, 2020


If you’re talking to the majority of people and you put it in these terms, say the difference between 30k, 60k, and 90k a year, the incomprehensible difference that billions make becomes more tangible in their intangibility: they stop making sense.

You can also think of it this way: in a 40 year career, someone earning $40k will only earn in total $1.2million. So just earning $5million (half of Warren's $10m, 1/10 of $50m) is 166 years of work, unachievable.

If you double it to $60k, it's still unachievable, 80 years of work.

At $100k, you earn $4m in 40 years of work, so earning $5million is barely achievable. And only about 2million of 120million households in the US have $5m.

Trying to recover money from the rich is a difficult task. If you have 70% tax, then a person with a $100 million income is willing to pay $70 million dollars a year to high end tax lawyers to avoid taxes.
Maybe (b/c this a serious misunderstanding of marginal taxes and marginal income gains), but the money would still filter into taxes even at slightly less rates via payments to lawyers, who would then pay taxes. At some income point, people just pay because they don't have the time or resources to fight.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on July 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


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