Posts Tagged ‘wealth’
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”
See how the amount donated by Americans to charity per year compares to the size of outstanding student debt. Or how Walmart’s revenue measures up against Elon Musk’s wealth. Or how the U.S. military budget stacks up against China’s… and so much more.
From the estimable David McCandless and his wonderful site Information is Beautiful, an illustration of how expenses and wealth that run to over a billion dollars compare.
Then peruse “$Trillions.”
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As we ponder the pecuniary, we might recall that on this date in 1989, Exxon Valdez, an oil supertanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company, bound for Long Beach, California, struck Prince William Sound‘s Bligh Reef, 6 mi west of Tatitlek, Alaska. The tanker spilled more than 10 million US gallons of crude oil over the next few days.
The Exxon Valdez spill is the second largest in U.S. waters, after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in terms of volume of oil released. It is the costliest disaster ever with no direct human fatalities. The oil, extracted from the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field, eventually affected 1,300 miles of coastline, of which 200 miles were heavily or moderately oiled; and it wreaked havoc with the habitats salmon, sea otters, seals, and seabirds in its path.
Exxon spent an estimated $2 billion cleaning up the spill and a further $1 billion to settle related civil and criminal charges. Exxon was also assessed another $2.5 billion in punitive damages in a suit (Exxon v. Baker)… but that was reduced by the Supreme Court to roughly $500 million. Exxon remained hugely profitable– the process of payment was drawn out over decades and long term damage continues and is not funded by Exxon. Hence, the Exxon spill is often cited as shorthand in conversations about corporate responsibility as a case of accountability for societal damage inadequately enforced.
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics”*…
The rich in the U.S. just keep getting richer. Over the five decades, incomes have risen materially faster at the very top than anywhere below, and similarly, wealth has accumulated much more quickly at the top than anywhere below. A report from the Stone Center On Socio-Economic Inequality (at CUNY) looks at the mutually-reinforcing relationship between these two dynamics…
Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people (homo) are wealthy (ploutia) in the space of capital and labor income in some countries. It can be quantified by the share of capital income rich who are also labor income rich. In this paper, we combine several datasets covering different time periods to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States from 1950 to 2020. We find that homoploutia was low after World War II, has increased by the early 1960s, and then decreased until the mid-1980s. Since 1985 it has been sharply increasing: In 1985, about 17% of adults in the top decile of capital income earners were also in the top decile of labor-income earners. In 2018 this indicator was about 30%. This makes the traditional division between capitalists and laborers less relevant today. It makes periods characterized by high interpersonal inequality, high capital-income ratio, and high capital share of income in the past fundamentally different from the current situation. High homoploutia has far-reaching implications for social mobility and equality of opportunity. We also study how homoploutia is related to total income inequality. We find that rising homoploutia accounts for about 20% of the increase in total income inequality in the United States since 1986…
Note that the report was written in the 2020 (and published in The Review of Income and Wealth in 2023). The dynamic has continued since; the polarizing impact has grown.
“Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950–2020,” from @stone-lis.bsky.social. (Read the full report here.)
[image above: source]
* Plutarch
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As we evaluate equity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that The Oregon Highway Division attempted to destroy a rotting beached Sperm whale with explosives, leading to the now infamous “exploding whale” incident.
“A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him”*…
Nathan Yau is back with a(nother) arresting graphic analysis– this time, of the median salaries of different occupations in the U.S. (based on 2024– so, pre-purge— data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). The median salary for full-time workers in the United States was $49,500; but salaries vary by occupation. The interactive infographic featured in the screengrab above shows– and allows you to explore– the spread…
Healthcare practitioners, such as surgeons and emergency medicine physicians, sit at the top. Airline pilot is the only occupation with a median salary above $220,000 that is not in the healthcare category. Then there are the CEOs and managers, followed by computer and math jobs. After that, most jobs sit below the $100,000-mark by median…
… The internet tends to skew our perception of how much people make. We see the things that people buy, but that is not always a good indicator for the wages people earn. These distributions are more bottom heavy than you might expect if you based your estimates on social media.
That said, all these jobs have a range of salaries, too. It’s not just variation within job categories, but variation for each job. The above charts, along with median salary, show 25th and 75th percentiles.
For example, construction supervisors make a median salary of $78,690, but 25% made $62,400 or less (25th percentile) and 75% made $100,200 or less (75th percentile).
There are also geographic differences, made more interesting by cost of living, but we’ll save that for another time…
Explore the comparative data: “Salary and Occupation” from @flowingdata.com.
It is, of course, important to remember (in a time like this, when so much attention is paid to the very rich) that this data excludes “unearned income,” the revenue that accrues to wealth (stocks, bonds, real estate, et al.) and the benefits of “contingent” stock/option bonuses. Along with inherited wealth, they explain most of the wealth gap (and economic angst) that plagues the U.S. today.
* Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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As we investigate inequity, we might recall that on this date in 1859, Norton I distributed letters to the newspapers of San Francisco proclaiming himself Emperor of North America…
At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of S. F., Cal., declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U. S.; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of Feb. next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.
– NORTON I, Emperor of the United States.
“Wheat feeds the West, rice sustains the East”
Tomas Pueyo on why this is so… and what that has meant for culture and history…
What’s your staple, bread or rice?
This is a momentous fact, for it might have determined politics, culture, and wealth.
How? Well, bread comes from wheat, and rice from… rice…
… Wheat and rice are not harvested in the same places. Rice and bread are the predominant food where rice and wheat are respectively the predominant crops. Here’s another way to look at the same data:
This, in turn, is determined mainly by this:
… But this doesn’t fully explain it since it also rains a lot in Ireland, for example, but nobody grows rice there. You need the heat found closer to the equator: Rice grows in hot, wet, flat, floodable areas, whereas wheat prefers cooler, drier, better drained areas.
Flooding rots wheat but can 3x the yields of rice. That makes wheat well adapted to hills, whereas rice can only survive on hills when they are terraced.
This sounds like just a fun fact, but it ain’t. Because rice generates twice as many calories per unit of area.
This means that rice nourishes families on half the land that wheat requires. Which means population density in rice areas can be twice as high as in wheat areas, or four times with double cropping. A hectare of land can feed 1.5 families with wheat and 6 with rice.
Yet rice paddies also require a lot of work—twice as much as wheat. And that work is almost year-round: preparing paddies, raising seedlings in nurseries, transplanting every single seedling by hand into flooded fields, managing water, pumping it, weeding, harvesting, and threshing—often followed by a second rice crop or a winter crop. These tasks peak during transplanting and harvest, creating critical seasons where a huge amount of work must be done in a short window of time.
Crucially, this labor cannot be delayed—if you miss the planting window or harvest late, the crop is ruined. As a result, rice farmers developed reciprocal labor exchange: neighbors help each other transplant and harvest in time. The timeliness pressure meant rice villages became tightly cooperative communities to ensure everyone’s fields were tended before it was too late.
Wheat farming historically had a more seasonal rhythm with periods of relative quiet. Wheat is typically sown in the fall or spring and then mainly just left to grow with the rain. Aside from episodic weeding or guarding the fields, there was less continuous labor until harvest time. Harvest itself was a crunch period requiring many hands with sickles—European villages would collaborate during harvest, and farmers might hire extra reapers.
These differences made these regions diverge across politics, culture, and economy…
Read on: “How Bread vs Rice Molded History,” from Pueyo’s Uncharted Territories.
* adage
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As we deliberate on our diets and their destinies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that Chester A. Hodge of Beloit, Wisconsin received patent No. 367,398 for ‘spur rowel’ barbed wire (consisting of spur shaped wheels with 8 or 10 points mounted between 2 wires). It was one of many patents for barbed wire (e.g., here), which spread across the American West rapidly (thanks, in no small measure to the guy featured in the alamanc entry here)– and (by protecting farmers from foraging open-range cattle) paved the way for the expansion of wheat (and other kinds of) farming.
“I seen my opportunities and I took em”*…
Since he kicked off his campaign, Trump’s business empire has landed billions of dollars of deals at home and abroad. Max Abelson and Annie Massa bring the receipts…
The way Donald Trump sees it, he’s the greatest businessman to campaign for the White House.
“I’m the most successful person ever to run,” he told an Iowa reporter in 2015. “I have a Gucci store that’s worth more than Romney.”
That might have been an exaggeration, but this isn’t: A decade later, no modern American president has positioned his family to make so much money while in the White House. Already, since the early days of his reelection campaign, he’s more than doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion.
In that time, the Trump name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, a multibillion-dollar valuation for his money-losing social-media company, more than $500 million in sales from just one of his crypto ventures and millions of dollars more from stakes in companies that offer financial services, guns and drone parts. Family members have also scored an array of corporate positions — at least seven new roles as an adviser or executive for his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., alone.
Compared with the tumult of the presidency, the empire’s approach is consistent and clear: Sell the family name. In any other era, this scale of presidential moneymaking would threaten to be the story of the year, but political uproar has hogged most of the attention.
In his first months in power, Trump put tariffs on and took some off, blamed Ukraine for Russia’s attacks, sent immigrants to a foreign prison and teased a third term that the Constitution doesn’t allow. And as he’s hacked away at the government’s workforce and budget, he’s shrunk the agencies and offices that oversee his public company, crypto projects and even conflicts of interest.
Trump has loosened constraints on overseas dealmaking that were put in place in his last administration. (He also let Elon Musk, the billionaire leading an effort to slash government spending, police his own conflicts). This week, he’s scheduled to dine with his new memecoin’s top holders.
What makes this era even more remarkable is how close Trump came to ruin. His first term ended with a riot at the Capitol, later followed by a $454 million civil fraud judgment and his conviction for falsifying business records. Trump has appealed both.
Now, his assets are in a trust overseen by his oldest son. And despite talk of a recession, the clan stands to get richer than ever.
“President Trump has been the most transparent president in history in all respects, including when it comes to his finances,” said a White House spokesperson. “President Trump handed over his multibillion-dollar empire in order to serve our country, and he has sacrificed greatly. President Trump has disclosed his financial holdings through his annual financial disclosure report and he will continue to do so.”
Trump Jr. said he shouldn’t be expected to change his career on account of his dad’s power.
“I’m a private citizen who has been a businessman and serial investor my entire adult life,” he said in a statement. “It’s ridiculous to expect me to stop doing what I’ve always done to provide for my five children just because my dad was elected president.”
These are the corporate connections, crypto projects and licensing deals — all of them since the 2024 campaign began — that the Trumps are using to climb higher than ever…
The gory (and mind-boggling) details: “The Trump Family’s Money-Making Machine” (gift link) from @bloomberg.com.
Apposite: “A World of MAGA Liquor Is Exploding Online. But What If It’s Not Real?“
* “Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft, but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” — George Washington Plunkitt, New York State Senator and “Sage of Tammany Hall” (See also)
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As we ponder probity (and its absence), we might spare a thought for Jonathan Wild; he died on this date in 1725. An English thief-taker and a major figure in the organization and growth of London’s criminal underworld, he was notable for operating on both sides of the law: posing as a public-spirited vigilante known as the “Thief-Taker General,” he simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes (fencing, but also selling goods he’d stolen back to their owners).
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