> But also, “assets minus liabilities” offers some large shadows to hide behind.

> So a better quantity to measure would be: the amount of money someone could bring to bear on a problem if they had to. If someone they loved fell deathly ill, but the treatment would cost some large amount of money, how much could they pull together in a month or two? How much could they borrow, and from whom, and on what terms?

The following breakdowns are largely just people's net worth (assets minus liabilities) with the credit they can tap because of their assets.

Not sure I entirely understand the point. Yeah, people with assets are generally more credit-worthy and can tap lines of credit.

> About 16 million people (↑7) are designated as HNWI.

What does the ↑7 means? Later he starts using it in a context that I don't understand (e.g. > About 250,000 people (↑5.5))

I have friends who are 6’s and acquaintances who are 7’s and their manner of thinking and goals in life baffle me. I simply cannot relate to them at all.

I grew up in a fairly egalitarian 1980s Nordic society and English is my third language.

I remember the first time I heard “worth” used in this American idiom:

“Person X is worth $Y”

It was shocking; almost like the most forbidden thing you could say, a glimpse of eugenics. If a person’s worth is measured in dollars, what does that say about the worth of underpaid women and minorities and children with development challenges…?

In the decades since, Silicon Valley has moved so far right that this barely registers anymore.

Like yes you can take any continuous variable and draw as many lines in the sand as you'd like (5 levels of tallness, or even 27 levels of tallness, or whatever) and actually say nothing while apparently sound like you're saying something??

https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/605075/are-you-ri...

99 vs 1%, normal vs millionaires vs billionaires, lower vs upper vs middle class, investor vs working class are some of the language I’ve seen used.

All of them are extremely inadequate and allow the |^7-11 folks to get away with a lot that they shouldn’t by scaring the folks at |^4-6 that it would apply to them.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is now couched in socialist rhetoric about inequality. We can tell this is the case because when wage compression occurs, people get upset at “inflation” and “it’s so expensive now”.

The bottom percentiles saw unprecedented growth in recent years relative to the middle. Rather than celebrate, people got upset because things got expensive. When poor labor gets paid more, they get more expensive. That’s how it works.

  Traditionally when talking about money as it relates to social class, people refer to an income bracket

I know this isn't exactly a forum predisposed to Marx, but I would encourage even the most fervent anti-communists to take some time to appreciate his economic work on a scientific level. Wealth is absolutely more important than income when analyzing society, because a certain amount of wealth makes one a "capitalist" (in a literal sense, not an ideological one). Capitalists live a life of luxury without working, and they are explicitly+intentionally tasked with the lions share of social responsibility (or, more pejoratively, social power).

TL;DR: You don't need to be a Marxist to appreciate the utility of labor-based class analysis in our society! Given that the traditional SV goal is to become a capitalist as quickly as possible ("FIRE"), we'd do better to discuss this stuff more frequently...

In fact kids probably know intuitively exactly where they fall on this scale without having to read a blog, unless their parents are ultra-wealthy but hide it from them really well.

Also putting someone with 300k vs 3 million in the same "bracket" is wild.

"A person with lower ↑6 wealth is a “high-net-worth individual” (HNWI, $1m)"

"About 16 million people (↑7) are designated as HNWI."

Aside from that, why not just use log10(<individual's wealth>/<average wealth>) as a function of a particular market like EU, USA, Greenland, whatever. That way the metric is agnostic to inflation and differences in currency value.