Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Digital Natives, in reply to ,
In Horan's case, I'm taking the piss. In Harre's case, it's a genuine question.
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Is she digital?
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Because he is Maori.
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Here's a wild punt. Brendan Horan.
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None of us are going to break any hearts with our tales of mere privilege. But I think it's worth hearing that that privilege just isn't what it once was. That's a message that might appeal to people who aren't particularly socialist in outlook. You don't have to believe in a flat wealth distribution to think that a hockey stick isn't good.
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OnPoint: Why does the top 10% paying…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Like race or gender, ‘class’ doesn’t limit the ability to think or imagine.
That’s right. Those things only limit the ability to directly experience. Thinking and imagining experiences goes some way to developing empathy, but it’s way easier to have empathy with experiences that are actually your own. So I can fully appreciate, having been there, what it is to have earnings in the top decile, and yet still struggling to save up enough for a dead average house, and still having 30 years ahead of me in paying it off. To people who lived through times where a house was affordable to even poor families, was paid off rapidly, and people in the top income decile were uniformly rich, it’s harder to comprehend (whilst still, of course, not completely incomprehensible). That’s why I bang on about it. To help people comprehend my experiences, which are not the same as their experiences. I can personally only imagine what it must be like to be in the situation Matthew describes – instead of hanging on to the bottom-but-one rung as I do, to be actually left on the ground. My imagining of that is that it would be extremely demotivating, and it would make me really angry. It might motivate me to make an enormous leap. Or it might make me feel like I should just give up and re-evaluate whether I’m even in a society that will give me a genuine chance at class mobility.
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OnPoint: Why does the top 10% paying…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Furthermore, one could be a capitalist at heart, and yet think that the income distribution we have is still not a good idea. This is the thinking behind showing the distribution for what it is, not what people would like it to be, or even what they think it is. The reality is starker than both of those.
Even quite staunch capitalists would probably suggest a flatter income distribution, and most people would say that they believe it’s not as flat as they’d like. That it is further not even as flat as what they believe is the final icing on the “this needs some fixing” cake.
How many NZers do really realize that the top decile earns as much at the bottom 7 deciles put together, and twice as much as the 9th decile? Even supposedly wealthy people in this picture are quite poorly served, when it comes to their slice of the pie. I’m quite astonished that it takes until the 9th decile to crack the 60kpa mark. I wouldn’t consider such people rich pricks at all, even if I was the kind of person to think like that. Not even close.
All of the real wealth happens in the top decile. People in the 9th decile still have to take 10-20 years to pay off the mortgage on an average NZ home. Only in the 10th decile will people have the kind of disposable income by which people land themselves in lifelong financial security at a young age. Everyone else is a battler until they retire. I don’t think this is even the American Dream, let alone the Kiwi dream.
I’d expect this distribution is highly generationally skewed, though. A person making 60k, but who owns their home outright is in a considerably better position that someone who doesn’t. They’ve quite possibly got twice the disposable income. So my above comment about lifelong security will not ring true for older people*. They’ve got that already, and will probably struggle to understand what the fuss is all about.
Which is part of the reason that capital and capital gain has become such an important question for this country.
*ETA: Read that as "Many older people". Obviously many of them do not own their homes, and many are un(der)employed. The comment is about the averages relating to this demographic.
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OnPoint: Why does the top 10% paying…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I did not miss the point. I read the question, and answered it
Yes, and the discussion then moved on to the point of the question. I think everyone got your point by now.
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OnPoint: Why does the top 10% paying…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Agreed, I think that it walks and quacks like income. It's also on a pretty massive scale. We're not talking about peanuts.
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OnPoint: Why does the top 10% paying…, in reply to WH,
@Matthew
People then bringing up opinions from foreign jurisdictions about whether capital gains are income is irrelevant to this discussion.
I think you missed WHs point. He’s talking about whether they should be considered income, and looking at how it’s done elsewhere is quite relevant. I read the question about whether income is included in the calculation as being a very fair question about how accurate a portrayal of real income we can get by only looking at official income, when a very, very major way of making massive amounts of money is simply left out of the calculation.
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