Yep. I'm not an economist but my social democratic common sense would tell me to look at the bottom 10% income bracket and see how they're doing.

Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent.

In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.

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IshKebab 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bottom 10% are outliers though. Bottom 50% is much more reasonable.

	▲	bryanlarsen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Treatment of bottom 10% and treatment of bottom 50% are both interesting metrics, but for very different reasons, and they are often contradictory. The "bottom 50%" is a measure of how well you make it possible for everybody to succeed without extraordinary help. The "bottom 10%" is a measure of extraordinary help.

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onraglanroad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The capitalist response to that would be that the investment in companies is better because it makes everyone richer in the long term by increasing overall wealth.

I'm not sure I buy it but it's an effect to consider.

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kubb 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That does sometimes happen - investment does cause development. The mistake is to assume that's always what happens, and that everybody can benefit from the development.

	▲	onraglanroad 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh I agree with you. I suspect it happens less than is the conventional wisdom, but I might be wrong.

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ajmurmann 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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kubb 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're conflating compounding market value with economic growth. One counterexample is when inflation raises prices, but not economic output. Asset prices grow but there's no growth.

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ajmurmann an hour ago | parent [-]

What do you think happens with the money that goes into stock? It doesn't simply vanish. It ultimately gets invested in salaries, construction of data centers and factories.

	▲	kubb an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's most certainly not what happens! The money that goes into buying a stock is being transferred to the people who sold you the stock (which, outside of the IPO are almost always market players). A company with a high stock price can "save money" by paying employees in stock, borrowing money cheaper, but it's NOT a primary way of funding the company.

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wqaatwt 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or hoarding real estate.. which is not particularly productive since it turns out higher prices don’t really stimulate supply sufficiently.

Also its not exactly obvious how much inflated stock market valuations benefit the economy that much or at all.

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paulryanrogers 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then why is so much money going into real estate and greater-fool crypto?

	▲	ajmurmann an hour ago \| parent [-]
		BTC market cap is $1.2T. S&P 500 market cap is about $66T. Why would we not want for money to flow into real estate? It's an area with massive demand and money flowing in to create supply is exactly what we need and is productive. What is not productive is the NIMBY scum that's preventing supply from being met.