Oh, and check this out:
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/developer-martin-selig...
That's gotta hurt!
But inequality is not a problem. People wanting to make it big come to the USA. That's why the USA has the biggest, most successful, companies that drive the US gdp forward.
Inequality is only a problem for people who are envious.
But I get your point, inequality isn't a problem in itself, but seeing your money go to rich people for no good reason does feel very bad even if the problem is the corruption and not the inequality.
> seeing your money go to rich people for no good reason
Anyone can buy stocks and get their share. For example, NVDA. If you'd bought some, you'd have made quite a lot of bank, and made your friends unhappy with you because of the money you unfairly made for no good reason.
I know many ordinary schlubs who became multimillionaires by simply buying NVDA, MSFT, AMZN, AAPL, etc.
Or when you have to pass by homeless tent cities in your downtown. Or when you are the victim of crime because the kid pulling a gun on you is envious because their family is poor and you're rich.
Extreme inequality brings social strife in multiple layers, if you're individualistic you might not care for it but for a society it fosters resentment and erosion of social cohesion.
But I don't think you care about that in general.
This is the conventional wisdom, but I can't think of a revolt in a free market country.
> But I don't think you care about that in general.
My reading of history is that free markets bring the greatest prosperity to the greatest number of people. No other economic system comes close.
Cutting other people down to size because you're envious just makes things worse. It produces economic stagnation, and the demand for "equity" is endless and endlessly makes things worse.
It doesn't end well.
Be careful what you wish for.
Keep in mind that the most prosperous companies are in America and bring that prosperity to Americans and are the envy of the world.
Lmao
This works well for companies because they can get higher margins. This works well for the people with money but other people are being left out. And with increasing inequality the number of people left out goes up.
Basically we are creating a world designed for the top x percent of people. And they are creating laws that favor themselves.
The big money is targeting where the customers are - the middle class. That's why VW got so big. Why Ford and GM and Chrysler made so much money. Selling cars to the middle class. Tesla has also moved down market for the same reason.
How's Rolls Royce, Bentley, and Jaguar doing? Case closed.
If you look at real incomes over time, they've been stagnant since the dawn of time; or at least as far back as we have kept track.
There was once wage growth because wages started from zero. It wasn't that many years ago that people didn't sell labor, only things. As we have transitioned into a labor economy, wages started to become a larger portion of one's income. To the point that nowadays more or less 100% of the average person's income is from wages.
So, with incomes and wages now being effectively equivalent, there is no room for wages to grow further. To do that now, incomes would also need to rise, and that has never happened.
Productivity has continued to rise since, but on the back of automation, not as a result of humans becoming even more productive laborers.
Take a look at the size of government over time. Where do you think the money comes from to pay for that?
This isn't true for the US. The chart that purports to show this is misleading. Essentially, there are problems with the usual chart: the two lines are indexed to different inflation measures, and the wages line excludes certain highly compensated occupations which have been experiencing significant earnings growth (probably because these occupations are where the productivity growth is happening).
Edit: Actually, even more issues. https://x.com/AwayBerk/status/1483564925213683719
Nothing "crazy" about it.
The "unintended side effects" of government policies are nearly always the result of ignoring the LoS&D or pretending it doesn't exist.
Supply and demand is a framework you can use to write your hypothesis in. It's not a law that predicts things.