Jeremy Hobson: Seven weeks into the original Occupy Wall Street protest at Zucotti park in Manhattan, tensions are rising.
The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post ran a front page editorial yesterday calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to evict the protesters. And a Marist poll finds half of New York state voters oppose the protesters.
The demonstrator’s mantra “We are the 99 percent,”
raises the question: who exactly are the 1 percent?
For answers let’s bring in Marketplace Economics Correspondent Chris Farrell. Good morning.
Chris Farrell: Good morning Jeremy.
Hobson: So who are the top 1 percent?
Farrell: Well the top 1 percent, they make more than $368,000, nearing $400,000 a year. Tend to be middle-aged and older. They’re married. Well-educated. Nearly all white; I was surprised, not very many immigrants in there. And then they’re concentrated in certain occupations: You have your CEOs and senior executives; finance, obviously that’s a big area; doctors; lawyers; and I would also say media, entertainment, sports.
Hobson: And is that group the same group that you would have found in the top 1 percent several decades ago, for instance?
Farrell: No I don’t think that’s the case. I think there’s been a big change. If we go into the past, and particularly when we start breaking down the top 1 percent and you go toward the really wealthy, in the past it was the rentier class. Let’s think about Edith Wharton novels. Today, it’s much more the working rich; people who have founded a company, say, in the information technology business — or more likely, run a hedge fund.
Hobson: Now one of the arguments that we keep hearing out of Republicans, especially, in Washington, is that it’s not a problem that we have these people at the top, that as long as more and more people are getting richer and richer, that’s great, that’s the way it should be.
Farrell: Well the problem is two-fold. One is the rich keep getting richer, and you know, the top 1 percent — the top 1 percent measured by income, they captured slightly more than half of overall economic growth from the period of 1993 to 2008. So it feeds the sense that this economy is increasingly unfair.
But the real point is about equality of opportunity. As the rich get richer, that means there’s less opportunity for those who don’t belong to that class. And I said, you know, that we had the change toward the working rich? We may be creating a society where the rich are simply people that clip coupons, pocket their dividend payments.
Hobson: Marketplace economics correspondent Chris Farrell. Chris, thanks so much.
Farrell: Thanks a lot.
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