The world death rate is about .85%/year, or over 5 years, ~4.25%. The world birth rate is about 2%/year, or over 5 years, about 10%.

Now factor in how much people's wealth changes, which is relatively consistent as they get older.

So yeah, add all that up and I'd call it pretty significant for only 5 years later.

if 90 percent of people were in the initial cohort and 90 percent of people were in the final cohort, at least 80 percent would still be in the lower 90 percent.

I said they have as a whole become wealthier. That doesn't require much movement among the cohorts, because the cohorts are based on percentages of population, not absolute wealth levels.

My 9 year old daughter is debt free, but doesn't really have any income. That places her as wealthier than 2 BILLION people (with negative net worth) using your methodology!

There are "lies, damn lies, and statistics." Your use of statistics falls into that category.

It doesn't matter how wealthy people are compared to each other, unless your overwhelming consideration is jealousy. It matters how wealthy people are compared to how wealthy they used to be.

Also "the bottom 90 percent became poorer" is an inaccurate statement, unsupported by the data. If you took the people considered part of the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009 after the housing/financial crisis, those specific people have as a whole become wealthier. The current group of people (in 2014) they might rate as the "bottom 90 percent" are a significantly different set of individuals, many of whom were not in the "bottom 90 percent" in 2009.

Except of course, if you click on it via Google it bypasses the paywall because of the referrer data being passed... sorry, thought this was a tech site.

Use this link instead, click on the top result:
https://www.google.com/search?...

A pain, I know.

Because the people involved in the prosecutions and classifications don't report up to him as the head of the executive branch? Because he doesn't have an absolute pardon power to pardon anyone he likes? You'd blame the CEO of a company for what his company does. In this case the President has way more legal power to intervene than a CEO would in a similar situation. Heck, after President Obama's recent stint of just changing laws with only a fig leaf of legal basis beyond he said so, presumably his administration thinks he can just unilaterally declare they weren't enforcing the law in these particular types of cases.

Asimov did predict that alpha particles would have the potential to disrupt computer memory back in 1952.....

This is so the new vending machines can accept CokeCoin transfers.... and mine more coins when they aren't busy.

I'm kidding, of course, everyone knows a rapper will create the first branded Bitcoin copycat currency!

And then they'd stop after people learned to go to checkout to see if they'd "won", and if not stop or get a refund, clear their cookies, etc... and try again.

What country are you talking about? The U.S. has been going steadily away from laissez faire capitalism for at least 100 years now... to the point where it might actually start turning back in the other direction as more and more centrally-planned fiascoes are revealed and the old socialist hippies start dying off.

Your other disconnect seems to be thinking that "corporation as top tier person" is laissez faire, as opposed to a government rent-seeking benefit largely found in countries with more government control of the economy. Pro-economic freedom doesn't necessarily mean pro-government organized corporation.

that left tens of millions without health insurance

At this rate, it's highly likely that there will be more uninsured in the U.S. over the next few years than over the last few years. That's what happens when you make a product significantly more expensive and more difficult to sell and to purchase.

If you think things are bad now, wait until next year when the business mandate that Obama unilaterally delayed kicks in. That's going to be even worse for the people who already had insurance....

The real question is why the Democrats needed to take over the entire health insurance industry if the goal was to just help pay for insurance for a few million folks that didn't have it and wanted it. You could have covered that with a check just out of what's been spent on the federal and state ACA exchanges.

The reality is that this has always been about the Dems making a federal power grab over health insurance and the health industry. That was never going to do anything but make the already massive government-induced problems in the insurance and health industries worse.

You may want to also factor in that insurance in NY is much more expensive than in many other parts of the country. The OP didn't specify a location, so it's difficult to tell, but I've had plans on the individual market before that were $350/month for a family of 6 in one state (after paying $1300/month in a high cost state), so $165/month for an younger individual doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Now, of course, the whole country is being forced into NY/NJ/MA-style expensive plans, so that all goes way up...