The top 10% share and top 1% share are increasing. The middle 40% and bottom 50% have gotten worse. The data in some of these graphs are for as few as three countries.

It paints a picture of the rich milking the rest of the world for wealth. It does not paint a picture of global improvement for the commoner. (Though, tbf, there isn't data on quite a lot of countries, so we really don't know.)

I think ratio of top to bottom does matter, or can matter. I don't really care how rich the rich are, but I do care that upward pressure on size and amenities for housing in the US means that there is a long standing (going back decades) shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US. There are people who are homeless in the US in part because they can't find anything for $400 or less a month in rent. We have largely done away with very basic housing, such as SROs and boarding houses. We tore a lot of those down (up to 80% of them in some cities) when the Baby Booomers were coming of age and didn't need something that cheap. We never rebuilt.

So, the US suffers from this idea that all housing needs to be appropriate for a family of four or five while our demographic has moved away from the nuclear family. We have a lot more single people putting off marriage, couples putting off having children or not having them at all or only having one child, seniors whose kids have all moved out, etc. But we don't really have housing designed for the needs of 1 to 3 people.

If we had strong policies to create enough very basic housing to house around 2 percent* of the population, then I likely would agree that I don't really care how rich the rich are compared to me. The problem is that the rich are the only ones being served here. There are huge challenges for the average person in the US.

I think the rich folks at the top are fools for doing this. This is the kind of thing that leads to bloody revolutions.

I won't be leading some bloody revolution. I am doing all in my power to reverse such trends. But I am an incredibly poor divorced single mom with health problems and adult special needs kids that still live with me. There are substantial limits on what I am likely to accomplish.

Doing a little blogging and making comments on forums is the majority of what I can do about this at the moment. Currently, I am also trying to put out flyers locally to promote some of my blogs to try to help put a dent in the high rates of poverty in the town I moved to. Unemployment and homelessness are rampant here.

But I am new to town and I lack connections and have credibility challenges. People think my "how to make money writing online" site is probably a scam. People don't want to approve the flyers for it. When they do get approved, people who see the flyers remain skeptical.

So, the reality is that the fools at the top who are milking the majority for money are the ones with the most power for trying to reverse such trends in some way (and, no, basic income is not the answer -- that is a lazy concept and won't work). I won't be leading the bloody revolution, but if it does happen, I will kind of sit back and laugh at the "victims" of it who brought it on themselves. Cuz, duh, you could see that coming from miles away and did nothing about it, you greedy dumbasses.

I am not talking about morality. I am talking about enlightened self interest here. (A la Henry Ford wanting all of his employees to be able to afford to buy a car.)

* http://projectsro.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-two-percent-solut...