Sure, but "growth" isn't some physical thing that the very wealthy might have stolen. "All the income growth has gone to the very wealthy" means the same thing as "Income growth has paused, with an exception among the very wealthy".

Except that they have stolen it. Through lobbying and other means, they've gotten the laws changed so that it's much easier for them to hoard vast amounts of money and not be taxed on it (low capital gains taxes, offshore tax shelters, etc). Simultaneously, they've gutted the power of unions, reduced social safety nets, and convinced a huge chunk of America that the ones that are really to blame are other poor people (who just happen to look slightly different than them).

There isn't just some random "exception" among the wealthy. They've very specifically engineered the economy so that they get vastly disproportionate amounts out of it.

I don't think that's a helpful way to look at the issue. You're pointing at real phenomenon, and it probably is true that the policies you're describing disproportionately benefit wealthy people. But there's no point where "they" looked at society and said "hey, let's steal the average American's money so that we can be richer". If you're looking for cartoon villains, you're not going to be able to make progress in the real world, where most people honestly believe the policies they advocate for are right.

Oh, I actually quite agree—at least in part. Jeff Bezos isn't sitting in Washington rubbing his hands together, twirling his little mustache and cackling with glee every time an Amazon warehouse worker pees in a bottle.

But...who would? I mean, that's not the behavior of real people. That's the problem, and the way these things are allowed to happen—people have a hard time understanding that real people, who love their family and tell jokes and have opinions about Game of Thrones, can do terrible, evil things.

It's not that the extremely wealthy actively seek the suffering of those beneath them (mostly; there are probably a few who are weird enough, but it's not enough to make a policy out of). It's that they don't care...or, worse, they see it as some kind of necessary evil to make the pure libertarian utopia they envision. And indeed, the idea that many of them are based in principles of individual freedom is a huge part of how they've sold the whole lot, despite the fact that carrying those principles to any sort of logical conclusion inevitably results in terrible suffering among real people.

But while I agree that there wasn't some intentional conspiracy meeting where they laid out a New World Order-type plot to take 99% of all the world's wealth, that doesn't mean that all the various efforts to enrich the wealthy aren't very deliberate—and to some degree coordinated.

Actions do not have to be taken by cartoonishly evil people to have cartoonishly evil outcomes, and looking around at America today, I can't help but think that's where we've ended up.

There are records of coordinated efforts to reduce the power of the working class, which in a political climate that operates under monied powers, means the stripping of wealth from the working class and further inequality. This was done via things like union busting (this picture showing union membership vs economic inequality is great: https://i.redd.it/r6wy0dcb09d01.jpg), globalization, etc.

The Powell Memo, written in the 1970s by future Supreme Court justice Powell, specifically called on business to reassert power over American politics:

> On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the US Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America.[14][15] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and an ostensible step towards socialism.[14] His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.[14] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry. [14]

> The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It sparked wealthy heirs of earlier American Industrialists like Richard Mellon Scaife; the Earhart Foundation, whose money came from an oil fortune; and the Smith Richardson Foundation, from the cough medicine dynasty;[14] to use their private charitable foundations, which did not have to report their political activities, to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Scaife in 1964[14] to fund Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, putatively minimalist government-regulated America as he thought it had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

> The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as well as inspiring the US Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[16][17] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[18][19]

> Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program; including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books and papers from popular magazines to scholarly journals and influencing public opinion.[20][21]

> This memo foreshadowed a number of Powell's court opinions, especially First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, which shifted the direction of First Amendment law by declaring that corporate financial influence of elections by independent expenditures should be protected with the same vigor as individual political speech. Much of the future Court opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission relied on the same arguments raised in Bellotti.

> Though written confidentially for Sydnor at the Chamber of Commerce, it was discovered by Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson, who reported on its content a year later (after Powell had joined the Supreme Court). Anderson alleged that Powell was trying to undermine the democratic system; however, in terms of business's view of itself in relation to government and public interest groups, the memo only conveyed the thinking among businessmen at the time. The real contribution of the memo, instead, was its emphasis on institution-building, particularly updating the Chamber's efforts to influence federal policy. Here, it was a major force in motivating the Chamber and other groups to modernize their efforts to lobby the federal government. Following the memo's directives, conservative foundations greatly increased, pouring money into think-tanks. This rise of conservative philanthropy led to the conservative intellectual movement and its increasing influence over mainstream political discourse, starting in the 1970s and '80s, and due chiefly to the works of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.[22]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Mem...

Further details of this assault on worker interests by corporate power can be seen in the following books:

https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-Take-All_Politics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)

https://secure.epi.org/event/the-one-percent-solution-how-co...

Well, the executives making the outsourcing decisions still have their paychecks and people who own stock are reaping the profits from cheap labor. It matches the gp comment's description of events just fine.

I've read our production has more than doubled since the 90's; wages have not.

How much of that is due to automation? Profit margins are also important, especially in a global economy.

Profit margins take a backseat to citizen welfare in questions of ethics.

Have you started or worked in a small business? Margin makes the difference between making payrolll and continued operation or failure/closing. Large corporations also prosper or fail based on margin.

Well, not every western country has horrible income equality. In the US, median disposable income has been pretty flat the past few decades.

In Sweden, the median household disposable income doubled in the last 20 years.

Not coincidentally, in terms of rich western countries the English speaking countries have the strongest historical ties to neoliberalism movement of the 80s, e.g. Reagan + Thatcher. See the graph of income inequality in English speaking countries vs non in the OECD since 1910.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/07/Top-Incomes.png

> There's been growth; it's just all gone to the very wealthy in the West.

Wrong. According to ourworldindata.org the world population in extreme poverty fell by half since 1990. I'm sure there are other sources to match this data as well.

But that doesn't fit your narrative.

Could you please stop using HN for ideological flamewar? Your comment would be just fine without the nasty bits at the beginning and end.

We've had to ask you this before, and eventually ban accounts that keep ignoring such requests, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of the site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.

You misinterpreted the grammar.

"In the West, it's just all gone to the very wealthy" is the intent. Not "All the growth in the world has gone to the wealthy in the West."

Yes, thank you; my phrasing was unclear.

"In the West, it's just all gone to the very wealthy" is also a claim that is broad, hard to define, and is empty without evidence.

Of course those who pay attention to these sorts of things know that the reality is more complex than that, even if you limit your analysis to "The West," which isn't a unified bloc. See the differences exhibited by the change in income inequality by these nations: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/07/Top-Incomes.png . You can't make a generalized statement about "wealth in the West," because it has exhibited different patterns in different countries over different timeframes. You have to specify all of those parameters before an intelligent conversation can even be started.

Even if the grandparent was worded too vaguely to communicate the poster's actual point, the grandparent turned out to be making a statement that was too low resolution to actually communicate anything beyond hand-waving anti-Capital rhetorical sentiment.

> those who pay attention to these sorts of things know that the reality is more complex than that

Kind of, but the trends are similar if the magnitudes are somewhat different. States with more distributive policies have less inequality, surprise surprise.

> Even if the grandparent was worded too vaguely to communicate the poster's actual point, the grandparent turned out to be making a statement that was too low resolution to actually communicate anything beyond hand-waving anti-Capital rhetorical sentiment.

I guess technically that's true, but it's also not far off. Because the West is back into relatively low growth, capital's influence is growing [2]. When you consider the only way to get capital is income or returns on capital, this is a simple recipe for inequality growing. And it indeed is the likely trend without (again surprise surprise) more redistribution policies [3].

[1]: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/14/oligarchy-on-ice.html

[2]: https://voxeu.org/article/capital-back

[3]: https://voxeu.org/article/new-globalisation-and-income-inequ...

What you quoted is talking specifically about growth in the west and who benefitted.