That's just a function of accretion. The pearl has just begun to be produced. Do you think that the kids of the current top billionaires will not be at least middling billionaires? The US has lower social mobility than most European countries. Considering the fact that Europe is part of the "Old World", that's a worrying fact in my opinion.
Just looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth I don't see a lot of hereditary names. There is the Mars family I suppose. I don't see names like Getty, Bruce, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller or Vanderblit. There is a Hunt.
The wealth doesn't look like it accretes faster than family growth divides it at that level.
1. There's a very specific reason for that: the computer revolution and the monopolies created by it.
Wait a few years to see what happens to teh children of the people on that list.
2. Look at the Waltons -- The only reason Bezos is the richest person in the word is because the waltons share the inherited wealth between them.
Look at a list of families, for a more accurate view of the Aristocracy:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/070116/top-25...
Most of these are ~100 years old.
Walton, Koch, Cargill-MacMillan, Cox, SC Johnson, (Edward) Johnson, Hearst
The odds of breaking in to that list are something like 1 / 300,000,000 but evidence is anyone can do it. MacKenzie is also my subtle counterargument to "Look at the Waltons". Breaking up the wealth ain't always voluntary.
Those are about the same odds as breaking in to the House of Lords.
Would the explanation that "while it is statistically impossible, it is strictly speaking plausible for an extremely devoted and lucky regular person to join the club" be a good enough excuse for re-introducing a landed aristocracy to American government, in your estimation?
Seems to me where the system is fair is unimportant, first we know it's not. Second is it designed to create disparities and a negative experience for most people. From a societal point of view that probably bad. And as I like say, the needs and wants of a couple of super wealthy people shouldn't be anything society cares about.
This is called recency bias. "This time is different." as opposed to all the other times they said "This time is different."
200 years ago> There's a very specific reason for that: the cotton revolution and the monopolies created by it.
150 years ago> There's a very specific reason for that: the industrial revolution and the monopolies created by it.
100 years ago> There's a very specific reason for that: the oil revolution and the monopolies created by it.
Etc.
I'm not sure that this is actually true, wrt. "old" wealth. Mostly, because Europe's high income taxes and broadly business-hostile environment makes it very hard for new wealth to compete with old wealth, and especially unattractive for "old" wealth to get involved in riskier, more innovative ventures of their own as opposed to just kicking the can down the generational road.
Worse the portion of wealth from true merit is cover for just how much is graft, rent, and corruption.
The end point of any system whereby power gives one the ability to further consolidate power needs to be balanced with redistribution else all power naturally concentrates in a shrinking few.
No man is self made. Billionaires are generally the children of lesser wealth.
We can also acknowledge that we are incapable of making such systems optimal and take from all to give to all in terms of public works, education, health.
This insures that even if capitalism doesn't properly reward all participants aptly for their contributions to society all get a chance to live and contribute. If you look at true believers in capitalism one would suppose that the market is the only guide to worth and how we should allocate capital. Neither is true.
I'm very pro-democracy; but that isn't a principle that has ever shown to have massive success at scale. There are a lot of fools out there.
Notably, some of the most successful experiments in democracy (British, American & Indian traditions) all have pretty clear principles of not having people with equal political power. Eg, a judge simply has more political power than an ordinary person. Britain and India have appointed members of their upper houses and the US has several safeguards to stop power defaulting to a majority.
Democracy hasn't achieved success due to some rosy concept of equality, it achieves success because the insufferable can't hold power and it provides an excellent method for different interest groups to negotiate and play mock-battle to work out who is stronger. There is plenty of evidence that dictatorship would be a better model if there were some magic method of keeping the dictator focused on good results - and indeed the US political system has tendencies in that direction. The creation of billionaires as replaceable aristocracy is a potential strength.
Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either.