There seems to be an open question among the wealthy and political class of how far inequality can go given the modern police state and effectiveness of technology in accomplishing the goal of maintaining or exacerbating the current political economy.
1. See historical populist grivences against aristocracy that result in social restructuring.
So it isn't really a "last resort". It's more of a "well you didn't compromise, so now our choice is to burn the whole system down"
The sans-culottes didn't quite accomplish their goals(at least immediately), but Louis XVI among other elites didn't survive.
Toussaint Louverture et al didn't accomplish their goals, but the French no longer controlled Haiti.
Even Lenin and Trosky didn't accomplish their goals, but the Romanov didn't leave the Ipatiev House alive.
Like many conflicts, one side doesn't have to win for one to lose.
Despite having higher cognitive functions, that impulse still exists and can only be suppressed for so long and so far. No one has infinite capacity to maintain what they see as unfairness indefinitely, especially when it seems that humans make their own rules.
1. Capuchin monkey fairness experiment, total duration: 57s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo
It is a combination of "Other People Have It Worse Than You Do" but uses the past as a point of reference.
We could just as easy compare ourselves to our presumably better off future and say that we have it worse off than them so we deserve to improve things now.
There are examples either way, and sadly you seem right.
I recently read but now can’t find a discussion around this that argued that extreme times promote extreme individuals. A violent revolution is clearly an extreme time and any leader that emerges is likely to have fought hard for their position.
I'd rather die some billionaires minimum wage security squad protecting his gold plated yacht than let some violent freeloaders take my shit and install some cuban-tier communist hell-hole where there's no incentive to produce even basic grain stocks.
One individual can own an entire town and charge people to live there indefinitely. This gets passed via inheritance and no longer equates to the initial building value.
On a micro scale, the timeframe for owning investment properties should be limited. They provide a service, but over a long period of time the owner is simply a leech.
It is more often than not that family firms in particular collapse after one or two generations, if not propped up.
The only answer I can see is that your customer base shrinks as fewer people are able to buy.
Or you get violent revolution as the poor are sick and tired of being priced out of even being able to afford housing and they decide they have nothing left to lose.
In the first one it was bittersweet as he only stuck to historical evidences and what he found was that the only periods of decreasing economic inequalities were wars.
The Walton family wealth, for example, is a capitalised stream of rents predicated on underpaying store staff and abusing market power with suppliers. That's a wealth transfer. That's redistribution.
The Duke of Westminster is worth $11 billion because his ancestor was besties with William the Conqueror (not william the earner).
These are wealth transfers and redistributions that, ideally, ought to be undone.
If I have 5 objects and five people and I give one to each that's a distribution. If I give them all to one person, that's a distribution. If I start with the first distribution and concentrate all of the items to one person, creating the second distribution that's still the same distribution.
Implication is often a highly personal thing.
Roughly, literally, "to give apart", i.e., to break up a resource from fewer to more owners.
I'm a big fan of poststructuralism but social spaces generally require that people understand each other. We can't just go redefining words on personal whims unless the people you're communicating with have consented to be a part of that metatextual process. This isn't that kind of space.
The definitions for "distribution" rather than "distribute" only weaken your narrow view further. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/distribution
Definitions include "An apportionment by law (of funds, property)" and critically "The apportionment of income or wealth in a population" with the example usage "The wealth distribution became extremely skewed in the kleptocracy." I.e. becoming extremely skewed didn't mean it was no longer a "distribution" in virtue of being concentrated.
And especially in a space where lots of people have a technical background, we're very likely to be thinking of the wealth distribution explicitly as a probability distribution (also listed as a separate definition), _especially_ we've already used the concept of quantiles on that distribution. Englishing flexibly, I think it's totally reasonable for "distribution" to refer to either the function assigning probability mass, _or_ to the act or process of making such a function true.
People in this thread are mostly using this word in a reasonable way. You're the one seeking to redefine words by insisting that only an entropy-increasing change is a "distribution".
Etymology is not the sole determiner of meaning. We can call an area on the moon a "mare", and know this comes from the Latin for "sea", but "mare" in the context no longer means "sea".