Sunday, May 20, 2018

The Birth of the New American Aristocracy

To be sure, there is a lot to admire about my new group, which I'll call-for reasons you'll soon see-the 9.9 percent.

According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group held 22 percent of America's wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963.

As of 2016, it took $1.2 million in net worth to make it into the 9.9 percent; $2.4 million to reach the group's median; and $10 million to get into the top 0.9 percent.

It's selective, naturally: Only 20 to 30 percent of New York applicants get in.

According to a 2017 study, 38 elite colleges-among them five of the Ivies-had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

Only 2.2 percent of the nation's students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, and yet these graduates account for 26 percent of students at Harvard and 28 percent of students at Princeton.

Not to worry, junior 9.9 percenters! We've created a new range of elite colleges just for you.

In 1954, 28 percent of all workers were members of trade unions, but by 2017 that figure was down to 11 percent.

San Francisco returned 162 percent in real terms over the same period; New York, 115 percent; and Los Angeles, 114 percent.

Across the United States, the journalist and economist Ryan Avent writes in The Gated City, "The best opportunities are found in one place, and for some reason most Americans are opting to live in another." According to estimates from the economists Enrico Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh, the migration away from the productive centers of New York, San Francisco, and San Jose alone lopped 9.7 percent off total U.S. growth from 1964 to 2009.

The new tax law; the executive actions on the environment and telecommunications, and on financial-services regulation; the judicial appointments of conservative ideologues-all will have the effect of keeping the 90 percent toiling in the foothills of merit for many years to come.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/ 

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