Downton Abbey economics
March 3, 2015
from David Ruccio
If you watched the Downton Abbey Season 5 finale, you will have seen the elaborately staged grouse shoot:
The bird shooting party is an extraordinary example of what life is like for these fortunate silver-spooners. They have helpers to clean their guns and prepare their guns. They have helpers to carry their guns to the field and to quickly reload for them after they shoot. They have helpers to beat the bushes and scare the birds into flight above their heads. And once the birds have been shot out of the air they have dogs to retrieve them from the fields.
Anything else we can do for you, chaps? Why yes. Once the unlucky birds are brought back to the house, it’s up to Mrs. Patmore and the cooks to clean and prepare them and serve them up as a delicious dinner. It’s amazing how much you can get done when everyone else does it for you. That’s a secret the rich have always tried to keep to themselves.
As it turns out, those scenes are a good way of understanding the mechanisms behind James Kwak’s chart of wealth distribution in the United States:
Imagine all the families in the United States lined up from left to right along the X-axis, from poorest to richest; the red line shows the total value of (almost) everything they own, minus their debts. All household wealth is represented by the area under the red line. The problem with understanding this picture, however, is that the red line is indistinguishable from zero for the vast majority of the population—all the wealth is crammed into the right-hand part of the chart.
Indeed! Those at the very top today have figured out what those who lived upstairs in Downton Abbey knew almost a century ago: it’s amazing how much wealth you can come to own when everyone else creates it but ends up owning very little of it.