The Lower Upper Class

An article in the latest Newsweek deftly chronicles the anxious times Americans across class and age barriers are going through (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/05/david-frum-on-high-anxiety-america.html). The article articulates an insight that has been formulating in my mind for quite some time.

The rich are not one uniform economic block. Far from it. The very rich are in a very different place from the ordinary rich. The top 1 % of the top 1% are doing way way better than the rest. In 2010 the top 1% in the US saw their income in 2010 increase merely by 11.6% while for the gain for the top 1% of the 1% was 21.5% - twice as much. And the reasons for this rising "disparity" is that the ordinary rich has the same investment channels open to them as the rest of us do -real estate, stocks and bonds while the very rich have a whole range of very exclusives ones. Hedge Funds. Private Equity. Elections. Counter-revolutions. Arms Supply. To name a few. So here we are. One more sub-division to think about in a rapidly dividing world. The Lower Upper Class (LUC). Where is a man to go with only between US 1 to 10 million of investible surplus to live on? Hard luck old chap. Let me know if you want to join our protest dharna next week. A related point. The world seems to live in a glass house these days. And grinning and bearing it is better strategy that throwing stones at intense scrutiny. But wonder how this intense scrutiny of a smarter planet play out on the timeless stage of class warfare. Any views IBM? PS: Wonder some smart soul somewhere (probably from the top 1% of the 1%) is formulating one more hush-hush high-returns exclusive "investment" scheme for the LUCs. As they say every second for every 100,000 LUCs a Madoff is born.