They can communicate with anyone else at almost zero marginal cost, and can sell products and services to basically anyone else on the planet. All because things keep getting cheaper.
That's the point of making things cheaper.
Sure, a consequence of that is that the founders and executives and financiers of Google, Samsung, Apple etc are wildly rich. And that means they can (and do) invest in new products and services to keep improving peoples' standard of living, as well as funding benevolent projects.
It's pretty amazing if you ask me.
Is this even happening though?
Driven by the vast interest coming from Bengaluru, technology hub, nearly half of enrollments in the country are in technology courses such as computer science (25 per cent) and data science (18 per cent).
- http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educat...
Top Freelancing countries on Elance:
India $312,865,112/649,566 freelancers
United States $310,023,579/1,123,935 freelancers
Ukraine $72,429,514/29,341 freelancers
Pakistan $71,061,107/176,011 freelancers
United Kingdom $35,320,646/126,670 freelancers
Canada $31,379,228/85,639 freelancers
Romania $28,062,831/44,305 freelancers
Russia $27,416,743/21,045 freelancers
Philippines $18,261,489/178,725 freelancers
Argentina $17,796,295
China $17,518,704/28,752 freelancers
Serbia $13,600,638/18,577 freelancers
Bangladesh $11,092,326/66,970 freelancers
https://www.elance.com/trends/talent-available/geo#GeoRankin...
Ukraine $2,468.54
Russia $1,302.77
Serbia $732.12
Romania $633.40
China $609.30There will naturally be a distribution of incomes among those people, with some people earning little or nothing, and some people earning a lot.
The point is that whatever the income a given person is earning, that is income that was unavailable to them before modern computing and communications devices became affordable to them.
That's money that people are using to build better lives for themselves, their families and their communities.
As I said, that is the point of making things cheaper.
I could stick it to the rich bastards who own energy stocks, but I'd rather be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
You can see this in one of the founders of Facebook - he renounced his US citizenship, because of the onerous tax burdens. (https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/a-facebook-founder...)
It's foolish to just say "we should tax rich people and rich corporations more." You're incentivizing them to not play the game, and wealthy people generally have more abilities to evade taxes than people in the lower upper class or middle class, which is who the burden will inevitably fall upon.
This is not the middle ages anymore, where peoples' riches are tied up in real estate and machinery. Immovable capital.
Capital is fluid these days. If you start guillotining people for absolutely nothing except being rich (which is what you're insinuating) they'll just leave and take all the capital and productive capacity with them. See Venezuela.
It's not supposed to.
Put another way, when workers become more efficient -- one factory worker able to control many weaving machines, or a relatively small group of programmers able to control many cars -- people's standard of living increases.
Maybe you're willing to pay more for clothes, or transportation, or any one thing. But paying more for all of the things that have gotten cheaper due to increases in efficiency since time X is tantamount to going back to the standard of living of time X.