What is Occupy Wallstreet?

[Jester]

The way that the Occupy Wallstreeters see it is thus;

[...]

They point to the fact that wages have fallen as a portion of GDP from 50% to 43% since 1947. What they don't acknowledge is that Real GDP per capita has gone from less than $10,000 to more than $50,000 over that same period. Would you rather have 43% of the 50K/p pie, or 50% of the 10K/p pie?

The great recession has caused a big disruption, and I'm not even sure how much we can bounce back from it, but we will bounce back some in the short term(3-5 years), and more in the longer term (5-10 years). It's natural to be pessimistic when you've just been beaten up and thrown in the ditch. But, we will get up, clean ourselves up, and slog on.

This is only a tiny part of the picture of "how Occupy Wallstreeters" see it. The protest is not primarily about the proportion of GDP represented by salaries and wages - indeed, that would be a bit of a stupid thing to protest over. It's about the *inequality* of how those salaries and wages are distributed.

This graph demonstrates much better what the problem is:



Distribution. Distribution, distribution, distribution. The richest are getting richer, the poorest are scarcely getting any share - even in absolute terms - of the increasing GDP. The average wage laborer is better off than in 1950, but by a shockingly small amount, whereas the wealthiest 10/1/0.1/0.01% are immeasurably richer. Meanwhile, uncertainty over the basics: ease of finding employment, government commitment to maintaining social safety nets, security of homeownership, access to credit, and so on, have all gotten far worse.

So, no, it's not about whether you want 43% of 50k, or 50% of 10k, because almost nobody is in that situation - that's an unrepresentative calculation, not broken down by income brackets, and therefore suffering from the ecological fallacy. It's whether it is fair that growth should flow to the richest in an overwhelming share, with low or zero compensation for the poorest. Especially galling is that policy, from tax policy to social security adjustments to the bailouts, have all trended for thirty years towards encouraging, rather than reversing, this situation.

-Jester