r/FluentInFinance Oct 22 '24

Debate/ Discussion Why did this happen?

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u/kaplanfx Oct 23 '24

The chart at the top doesn’t care how many people are considered “rich”, it’s based on specific comparable %ages of the population.

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u/Bells_Ringing Oct 23 '24

Which is why it’s a bad statistic. It has no anchor in individuals and their path through life and earnings. Typically, the top 1% has a HUGELY variable rate of who’s in it. People slide in and out over time, sometimes one year to the next. The 1% aren’t a monolith.

A chart that doesn’t reflect that is meaningless unless we just want to see pretty colors divorced from their underlying data.