Stonge wrote:Justify please.
OK:
scrumpyjack wrote:I have glanced through it but rather lost interest when it started by saying it ignored pension wealth!
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For this report to have much use it should included the capitalised market value of everyones' pension rights (state, DB, DC etc)
It's about wealth, not income. You can't sell pensions, give them away, convert them from one form of wealth to another. If you're not interested in "the use of wealth in retirement", why bother commenting on a thread about it?
lootman wrote:Agreed. It would make more sense to leave out your primary home in my view.
But how do you capitalise the market value of a pension?
But the report is significantly about what people do do with their homes - downsize, use equity withdrawal etc. - and whether that wealth is subsequently available for inheritance. Leaving out the major part of true wealth in a report about wealth would be stupid. Trying to come up with a figure that would be relevant for "what standard of living does this retiree have" or "how secure is this person" might be interesting for a different paper, but it's not what this paper is about. It's about the use of wealth in retirement. Not the use of DB or DC pensions.
UncleEbenezer wrote:The state pension entitlement alone represents a level of personal wealth that puts you round about the borderline of the global top 1%.
According to Oxfam's figures - which inexplicably exclude redistributive state actions such as pensions and other benefits.
It's not wealth. As SalvorHardin manages to get right once, "income is a flow, wealth is a stock". Pensions and benefits are income.
scrumpyjack wrote:Well not 'inexplicably'. It is part of the leftwing mindset that always wants to criticise 'inequality', exaggerating it wherever and however possible.
Now you're attributing the correct use of "wealth" and "income" to a "mindset". Well, it's the correct definition, so if you're saying that "leftwing" thinking is correct, but it's not yours ... I'd point out we've already established it's the IFS's "mindset" too.
lootman wrote:I'm not sure I'd trust Oxfam on this topic.
Well, they've got the definitions of wealth and income right, so they're already ahead of you ...
It always seems to be banging the drum of inequality rather than helping to alleviate famine. And whilst there are pockets of poverty and hunger in the UK, I don't think anyone believes we suffer from famine. Historically Oxfam looked overseas for its good-doing. I am with Jack here in that, if you focus on alleged inequality then you end up opposing a class of people and seeing them as the problem, AKA "the rich". So Oxfam has become political, straying from its core focus on charitable work.
Oxfam still does the vast majority of its work overseas. Oxfam was only mentioned in this thread because someone wanted to talk about the wealth of the "global top 1%". Not about anything it's said about the UK. It seems Oxfam only penetrates your consciousness when you think it has said something about the UK, which you take as criticism.
JohnB wrote:Many of these '1%' calculations handle education and secured debt badly. So a junior doctor aged 28 with a lot of student debt and a hefty mortgage is viewed as having net wealth well below zero, though their earning potential is much greater than some aged 60 in Africa who has $100 in savings.
Again, they are talking about wealth, not prospects, or standard of living. "Earning potential" is a subjective guess. The reports on global comparisons of wealth that I've read do point out student debt is a tricky area, since whether its repayment should be seen as a tax, and whether it may be forgiven at some age, vary between countries.
Within a country inequality is more relevant, though earning potential and future taxation/benefits makes comparisons across different ages unhelpful. Inheritance is one of the biggest distorters of the figures, as very few track possible windfalls like inheritances.
The thread is about people in retirement. The paper does talk about inheritance, quite a lot. But "possible windfalls" are just that - "possible". People don't own inheritances before they get them. They don't know when they'll get them, whether the current owner will give it to someone else, or spend it themselves. There's nothing there to "track".
UncleEbenezer wrote:https://bahumbug.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/dodgy-data/ wrote:
Oxfam grabs a headline with a report telling us the richest 1% will own half the world’s wealth in 2016.
And if we look at your blog, we find that Oxfam was mostly talking about the richest billionaires, not the 1%. So I don't think they were grabbing a headline about the 1%. We also find their figures come from the oh-so-leftwing Credit Suisse and Forbes. My god, the left-wing conspiracy is vast, everyone!
UncleEbenezer wrote:But googling “World Wealth” finds this report, which tells me total world wealth is projected to be $64.3 trillion in 2016.
The link is now dead, but it must be this that the OECD referred to:
So, no, your calculation was useless, since that was looking at the wealth of High Net Worth Individuals (investable wealth over $1 million), not the world. Rather ironic that you tried to criticise Oxfam and Credit Suisse with a blog post titled "Dodgy Data", isn't it?
SalvorHardin wrote:Oxfam's work on inequality and poverty in the UK is laughable.
Not as laughable as UncleEbezener's, obviously ... But we're not talking about their work in the UK. They were brought in because UE made a bad calculation about global wealth and ended up thinking, thanks to not understanding what wealth is, that this meant UK state pensioners are wealthy because they have an income.
SalvorHardin wrote:Like Piketty, Oxfam places no value on welfare and social security benefits. These aren't just cash payments; there's subsided rents, free healthcare, etc. Doing so is ignorant. Or deliberate, so that they can make themselves appear more relevant.
Their "1% owns 50%, or 90%, etc." type of arguments are invariably flawed. Given that they consistently make such massive errors, why should we assume that the rest of their work is accurate?
Piketty makes other big mistakes, such as ignoring depreciation, but that's off-topic for this thread.
That's all highly contentious partisan spin. Oxfam and Piketty use the real definitions of wealth (which you later confessed to), but you, for ideological reasons, want them to put things like "free healthcare" in there. You can't sell free healthcare; you can't inherit it. The price put on it is highly disputed - people's needs vary, the amount charged for it depends on the legal situation, the competition, the profits taken in different countries - so trying to shoehorn it into a discussion of wealth would be a massive red herring.
No, it's not "ignorant" to use actual definitions. Those aren't "massive errors", and you are demanding they should be deliberately inaccurate, to fit in with your personal (and, compared to them, irrelevant) ideology.
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So, a load of tosh.