Those who can afford to put 80% of their savings away for 20 years are those who are least vulnerable to the effects of inflation.

The people most affected are those who have most of their assets in cash or cash equivalents. The low and minimum wage earners who can't afford to invest in stocks. Those who are attempting to enter the property ladder who need to save a deposit for a mortgage and see that their savings are declining by 7.5%/year.

At an inflation rate of 7.8%, it takes only 9 years for the price of everything to double. That minimum wage earner now has had half of his hard work amount to nothing, but the house he wanted to buy is now twice as expensive.

In other words, the only remaining way to “save money” is to buy assets largely owned by the rich and further drive up the inflated values of those assets.

Said differently: investing in ways similar to how the rich invest seems like a generally sound strategy, all else being equal. (They don't keep much money in passbook savings accounts.)

Sure, but really the reason we should invest like the rich isn’t that it’s sound for rational economic reasons, but that the rich will use their influence on politics to ensure their investments do not decline as much as they would without interventions.

Equities are not largely owned by the rich. They are mostly owned by pension funds. The "rich" do not own majority of the assets (though, of course, they own very disproportionate amounts of them, relative to their numbers, as that's what the word "rich" means).

Hmm, this article seems to say they are.

"The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks"

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...

Somewhere I read that the top 1% owns about 50% of stocks.

And then whenever any policy that would reduce the profits from stock trading is floated, it's shouted down on the basis that "it'll hurt your retirement". A very cunning trap.

Exactly. It’s how any corrupt system is maintained. A dictator puts some inner circle of favored people under him, and then a larger layer but still small as a percentage beneath that, and so on all the way down, so that every layer has an incentive to support him and suppress the layers beneath. Add to that disproportionate influence through control of the military, police, and or media and even a 1/5 or less population can suppress the rest. Obviously our economy isn’t run that way but the same principle applies. We align the incentives of each person to act or vote in ways that benefit the already rich.