> This is a typical "let's be all equally poor/bad" argument.
It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class.
Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power.
Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power.
And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.
> Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible.
Jamie Dimon went to Tufts — Harvard-adjacent? — with an MBA from Harvard.
"Inequality tends to be greater in developing countries than wealthier ones. The United States is an exception."
"In 2021, the richest 1% of Americans owned 34.9% of the country’s wealth, while average Americans in the bottom half had only US$12,065 – less money than their counterparts in other industrial nations. By comparison, the richest 1% in the United Kingdom and Germany owned only 22.6% and 18.6% of their country’s wealth, respectively."
> 1% owning about a third of all wealth seems remarkably skewed.
This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed. If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are unless you also want to be part of the elite?
How it actually affects people is what matters. Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold for how much wealth some subset of the population should have leads to endless bikeshedding.
> This isn’t that interesting unless you can pair it with numbers showing how the remainder is distributed
I didn't bring up the figure - I was just remarking on how I had a different reaction to it. And the remainder is also distributed in a non-diffuse manner.
> If the majority of people have a high quality of life, who cares how rich the 1% are
Do the majority of people have "a high quality of life"? I'm not sure that's true, but assuming it is true, then one issue is the massive power imbalance in terms of control over society: small numbers of people having huge influence over politics, the media, social tech companies etc.
> Trying to pick some arbitrary threshold
Which I was not doing. I'm not sure what would be the best distribution - but if I can't look at it quantitively, I think we can consider it qualitatively. Would we be in a better place if we moved towards more wealth inequality or less?
Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it. In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%. And even in the top 1%, a lot of the owners are like retired dentists or early employees at Microsoft. They don’t exercise meaningful power over these companies by virtue of ownership.
That diffusion of ownership means that capital usually has much less power than the managerial class in terms of actually running the company. Jamie Dimon owns something like 0.1% of JP Morgan. In a traditional Marxist analysis, he’s actually an employee. He makes money from his labor. Even after 20 years the dividends from his JPM stock are less than his compensation as an employee.
You have this class of people now whose wealth and power doesn’t derive from owning the means of production, but by having credentials that persuade a diffuse group of shareholders to appoint them as managers of these corporations. And Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
> Ownership in the US is diffuse in comparison to the traditional Marxist scenarios, where you have someone like Andrew Carnegie who controls a business by virtue of owning it.
It's unclear why you even mentioned the US specifically. The so-called "modern corporation" and "the traditional Marxist scenario" are both US. Although Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland, he emigrated to the US at age 12, and Carnegie Steel was a US company.
> In a modern corporation, ownership is much more diffuse. A big blue chip like JP Morgan is mostly owned by people outside the top 1%.
This definitely makes a lot more sense than "Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth."
Of course, I'm just quibbling here. I don't disagree with your main point:
> Harvard and similar elite schools gatekeeps entry into this class of “non-owner managers who run everything.”
It’s not, and I think your view ignores a really important fact about our society. Ownership of wealth in America is relatively diffuse. The top 1% owns only 32% of the wealth. And even the top 1%, which starts at about $12 million net worth, covers a lot of people who aren’t exactly the ownership class.
Much of the power in society is therefore held by a class of non-owner managers that run these enormous institutions. Folks like Jamie Dimon and Tim Cook are billionaires, but they made that money by being very highly compensated employees of institutions in which their equity interest is negligible. Many layers of managers beneath those executives also wield tremendous power.
Institutions like Harvard serve as gatekeepers to those roles. They also serve as gatekeepers to adjacent industries, such as finance and law, that not only are lucrative, but also exert tremendous power.
And as credentialism has overtaken society, the same class of Harvard-educated professionals have come to run everything else as well. When an expert agency sues a corporation over some important issue, it’s highly likely that the agency expert policymakers, the agency lawyers, the corporation’s lawyers, the corporation’s management, the judge, and the journalist reporting on the case all went to Harvard or one of a handful of other elite schools. They all went to school together, they attend reunions and weddings together, their kids end up marrying each other.