Compare one billionaire buying a mega yacht and 10,000 people buying their first car, in both cases you've created say $200M in direct GDP, but in the later case you have 10,000 people more mobile to get a job or consume other goods or services.
> The second part of Bismarck’s strategy to destroy social democracy was the introduction of social legislation to woo the workers away from political radicalism. During the 1880s, accident and old-age insurance as well as a form of socialized medicine were introduced and implemented by the government. But Bismarck’s two-pronged strategy to win the workers for the conservative regime did not succeed. Support for the Social Democrats increased with each election.
I don't understand why the USSR failing or being 'bad' is necessary to further incentivize 'the rich', if anything I'd say the opposite is true.
The USSR was bad because they were neither socialist or communist but an oligarchy bent on maintaining power at all cost -- just like China is today. The people at the top are the aristocrats in revolutionary France.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/11/384988128/the-...)
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/in-the-balance/2017/...
This is obviously wrong. Take India vs Switzerland as an example. Also, in the post-war era, the Western European countries saw a diminution of wealth disparity at the same time as a great wealth increase.
Actually the history of the western world in the 20th century looks more like “the less wealth disparity, the more wealth growth” (I'm not implying causality, but at least the correlation goes this way).