So, if there is any indication that wealth has been accumulating faster, it is not on the article. And as such, the article is valueless and a complete loss of time.
http://fortune.com/2014/10/31/inequality-wealth-income-us/
There is an economist called Thomas Piketty who has made his name by studying and measuring inequality over the years. Read his book and you will get a detailed analysis of how inequality has increased in our society.
If me and the rest the million other people in my city have $100,000, some billionaire in a city somewhere else making another 100 million doesn't really have any impact on me directly. Yet it increases this inequality metric and I'm supposed to be outraged.
If the billionaire was using this position to corner the real estate market I'm trying to buy a house in, then I might be upset. But, I could also pool 1,000 of my friends together each with our $100,000 into a corporation and corner a market as well.
So why exactly is inequality relevant? Shouldn't we be focused on just raising where the bottom of the income range is rather than cutting down the tall outliers?
It seems to me like trying to make yourself wiser by killing everyone with more education than yourself.
It's waaaaay harder for you to organize and mobilize your 1000 buddies than it is for 1 billionaire to decide he wants to do something you don't want, such as lobbying politicians to give him a tax break, for example.
If we want to stop regulatory capture, stop that. Don't worry if it's one person or 1000 behind a movement.
According to this article, though, there has been an increase of consumption inequality from 1980 to 2005 in the US according to various papers: https://web.stanford.edu/~pista/JEP.pdf. But the consumption inequality is far less outrageous than income inequality and can be estimated to have been in decline in the world at large through data from the World Bank's DataBank.
See “Measuring inequality: A three-headed hydra”[1] in The Economist and “Economics is all about consumption” by Scott Sumner.[2]
[1]: https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/07/measuri...
[2]: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/07/economics_is_al....
Anyone with some capital could've invested in Netflix, Facebook or Google several years ago and would have achieved a good return on their money.
Even if some sort of global wealth tax would be introduced (that's a big IF) to fix the accumulation of extreme wealth, would people be better off? The amounts collected, spread out over the entire population, would be relatively small. And most of this new wealth is mostly paper wealth -- the headline next year could very well be: "World's richest lost $3tn of their wealth".
How do you decide who gets the work?
But when you say "without visible contributions to society." why should an extremely wealthy person have to contribute to society?
If history says anything, it's that humans only see this when the structure collapse, not when it's still working.
And to be harsh and potentially thought as rude: all you have been saying is a dream, a dream of impractical theorist.
Regardless of how rich I am, I still need to eat and live and put clothes on my back. Are these not contributions?
Or are you suggesting that the wealthiest are parasites simply because they should contribute more to society than someone less financially well off?
Ideally, one should contribute as much as she/he takes. Of course, that's impossible and impractical.
I'd say the higher in the social rank, they ratio of contribution to taking drops exponentially, not linearly.
That's the problem.
You mean the richer people are, the ratio of their contribution to taking grows? That does not seem possible, because that will not make the person rich in the first place.
But the problem is the ratio of their taking far outpace the contribution.
Yes, parasite, and what happens to parasites which are too successful?
If my US company shifts labor to India, do we assume it is bad simply because the US doesn't receive those wages to stimulate the US economy? Does this benefit India though?
I think your argument depends on perspective, from US point of view this situation is bad, from India's it isn't bad. From the wealthy person's doing this, it simply benefits him/her.
I don't know how to solve this and completely agree with the argument but it is technically flawed.
No one said that it was, and it isn’t illegal to be a parasite. As to the rest, life is a competition.
If influence, specifically political influence, and wealth could be perfectly decoupled, no reason. That nexus, however, means an oligarchical class of rich idiots have the capability to project their stupidity onto national policy.
Society as a whole benefits much more when each generation has to earn the bulk of their wealth.
When Elon Musk becomes obscenely wealthy by creating affordable electric cars and space flight, everyone else gets the benefits of affordable electric cars and space flight. Not talking trips to mars, but constellations of satellites offering super cheap worldwide internet.
What the Koch's spent their money on is an entirely different issue.