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In what world does investing roughly 3x the median yearly income in the US into your child's potential music career not count as "quite rich"?
It is difficult to comprehend how staggering wealth inequality is. Minimum wage earners have more in common with her parents, then her parents did with the truly wealthy. I have always liked Pen's parade (which is about income rather than wealth), but there are other aids. One pixel wealth might work in this context because they provide a marker for median income in the visualization.
Okay, and? Sorry if I have a bit of a snarky tone throughout this comment, but it frankly annoys me when people bring up stuff like this. Yes, richer people exist, and mathematically the Swift family net worth (pre-Taylor's career) was surely closer to a minimum wage family than to Jeff Bezos. I don't expect anyone would suggest Mr. and Ms. Swift to be first at the guillotine if the revolution comes. I don't even begrudge them using their wealth to help their daughter's career. I bet most would do the same if they had the resources. But...
Being able to invest anything, let alone 120,000$ into something as unsure as a pop music career, is very foreign to me, a minimum wage earner. From my perspective, the Swift family had a heck of a lot more in common with the elite than with my peers. Sure, they didn't have "buy-private-islands-and-tickets-to-space-Musk-Bezos" type money, but they clearly had enough money to never need or even want anything.
Comparing this with minimum wage earners is pretty shortsighted, even if mathematically their finances are closer to minimum wage earners than to the 0.0000001% of ultra wealthy. The leap from "closer in net worth mathematically" to minimum wage earners than the ultra wealth to "have more in common" with minimum wage earners than the ultra wealthy is just plain wrong. The math doesn't represent the reality of these different financial situations. In reality, their lives were much closer to that of the elite than to the poor fucker buying their groceries in quarters at the Dollar Store.
The existence of people who have so much wealth the human mind can't even conceive of it doesn't negate the wealth the Swift family clearly had, and it certainly doesn't mean their economic and social lives are closer to that of minimum wage earners than to the ultra wealthy.
You have a point that there's a huge difference in the life of a minimum wage family and a family able to invest 6 figures. Context matters though and I think the point was that they didn't have an overwhelming amount that can force success; we're talking about a financial-secure and supported start that enables pursuit of things that are unlikely to pan out. Still no small luxury, by any means.
FWIW 0.1% is already 38 million dollars (net worth, US, 2012 data).
E: Speaking of context, you were specifically talking about commonality between the, idk, bottom 1-10%, top 1-10%, and (whatever is ultra-wealthy). So my point may be the one made out-of-context.