Question for the wealthiest 10%... how?

kidmugsy

Glen_Clark wrote: »

ad hominen

And a richly deserved ad hominem.

JohnRo

kidmugsy wrote: »

And a richly deserved ad hominem.

I wonder if the insider trading crooks at the BoE think their pensions are richly deserved.

Glen_Clark

talexuser wrote: »

Amstrad started out selling speakers with plastic diffraction vanes where a tweeter would be but no drive unit underneath, and cassette decks with a dolby button but no dolby circuit inside!

Alan Sugar also realised you had to get plenty of flashing lights and meters on the front, even if nobody knew what they did. He used to call it a 'mugs eyefull':rotfl:

Glen_Clark

MarcoM wrote: »

Or be a socialist and be bitter for the rest of your life, expecting the state to bail you out at all times with no responsibility for yourself....

Err Hello. How does that make you one of the wealthiest 10%?

grey_gym_sock

gadgetmind wrote: »

BTW, this stage of development is called "post scarcity". Basically, everyone has enough of everything and ceases to really care about money.

Think of Star Trek humanity or Iain M Banks' "Culture".

yes ... the thing is: we should be starting to get there (in some countries), but i don't see much sign of it.

gadgetmind

Naaa, we're centuries off, and it might never happen as humans may never get the hang of finite greed.

grey_gym_sock

gadgetmind wrote: »

Naaa, we're centuries off, and it might never happen as humans may never get the hang of finite greed.

well, we have at most a few centuries to get the hang of it:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Glen_Clark

Like a survey I heard where people were being asked what was a comfortable amount of money to have. Some had many £millions, but they all thought a comfortable amount was a bit more than they had already

Eco_Miser

Glen_Clark wrote: »

2) Duke of Westminster - Again you have to go back to the 14th Century. His Ancestor married a 14 year old girl (would have been locked up as a pedophile now, but things were different then)

1677 - 17th century was when the Grosvenors acquired Mayfair by marriage. I suppose a 14th century ancestor on the Davis side could also have married into the land. Married, but probably did not consumate the marriage until much later.

Glen_Clark wrote: »

and she came with a dowry including Mayfair - which was not much more than a swamp in those days, but handed down over the generations and worth somewhat more now!

Which means that the Grosvenor family did a very good job of a) developing that swamp into possibly the highest value land in the country, and b) holding onto that land instead of selling it and squandering the money (or as often happened squandering the money, and being forced to sell the land).
While each successive head of the family certainly became rich by inheritance, they became even richer by property development, which may be considered as work of a kind.

racing_blue

cepheus wrote: »

I doubt if that is the case, here is a wealth distribution for households which shows how it is concentrated in pensions and property, as well as the top 10%

Thanks- that it interesting data & it made me look at the ONS report again

As a point of detail, that chart is about the total wealth held by deciles of households, rather than the average wealth of households within that decile. The vertical axis is denominated in trillions.

Each decile contains 2.63 million households, so each bar needs to be divided by 2.63 million to give a figure for mean net wealth.

Here is a link to the report I read (pdf):

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/was/wealth-in-great-britain-wave-2/wealth-of-the-wealthiest--2008-10/wealth-of-the-wealthiest-households--great-britain--2008-10.html

and here is a digest:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/dec/03/richest-10-uk-households-40-per-cent-wealth-ons

Some excerpts:

"There were 26.3 million households in the UK in 2011. Of these 29 per cent consisted of only one person and almost 20 per cent consisted of four or more people"

"In 2008/10 the Wealth and Assets Survey (WAS) estimated aggregate total wealth; the combined net wealth of all private households within Great Britain, at £10.3 trillion"

"The wealth held by the richest 10% of households combined was £4.5 trillion and represented a 43.8% share of aggregate total wealth."

From those figures I'd calculate that the mean household net wealth is £391,634 (10.3 trillion / 26.3 million) and that the mean wealth of the top 10% of households is £1,711,026 (4.5 trillion / 2.63 million). That is the sort of territory I was thinking about in the first post.