And no, wealth is not the amount of liquid cash you have. If that were true, I'd be dead broke.
> the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some.
Wealth creators will be growing the pie at a higher rate than those who do not create wealth.
My worry is that we are not creating enough new wealth but just distributing it lopsidedly.
Wealth is not being distributed. A laborer gets paid for the value he creates. There's no "distribution" going on (except by the government).
Not true at all. Most labourers have nowhere close the pricing power necessary for this to be true. Information is obfuscated (legally of course) on purpose.
If you believe you are seriously underpaid, explain to your employer what value you are creating, and negotiate.
If you start your own business, you'll find out exactly what you're worth.
Let's take a Principal Engineer. A bad choice to make my case with, because among others, they do pay rather well. For a Principal Engineer, it is sort of a job requirement at that level to save or generate of the order of ~100 million dollars per year. An outsourced engineer sees nowhere near 1/10th that amount in his/her salary.
For non software engineers it's much worse.
Because statistics clearly show median real wealth growing rapidly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
I grant you that it is very hard to measure ownership of (wealth generating) assets, hidden behind legal obfuscations.
Lorenz curve [0], GEI [1], Gini index of owned wealth generating assets would be the right thing to measure to see how understand one's share of the pie. But an enormous amount of records of such wealth is just hidden away, using laws that those very owners helped pass.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_curve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalized_entropy_index
BTW I am willing to be convinced to adopt a different position if I see a well researched, credible Lorenz curve data that has tracked the shadow wealth to some degree of accurate approximation.
Here is net wealth increasing for all, let's celebrate: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_w...
My point is that the pie is growing and all are benefitting. Yes, rich may be getting more but not at the expense of poorer people as their wealth is increasing too. It's rather unfortunate but it seems that the pies grows fastest (and poor benefit from that growth too) when wealth is allowed to accumulate and yes that means more inequality but if all get better off, that's the price we have to pay for faster growth of total pie
This is the main point of contention though.
Earlier generation middle class seems to have been larger and more financially secure. That would be our parent's generation. Of course not all of our parents would qualify.
It is true that middle class has been shrinking. What is often overlooked though ks that the majority of that middle class moved on to the upper class, so not bad at all and aligns with "growing pie"
> majority of that middle class moved on to the upper class
Is this true in the US in inflation adjusted terms ? Can say that it is certainly reversed direction in my country.
On lived experience: my lived experience tells me the Earth is flat.
That ship has sailed, beyond the horizon. Hope you catch the reference.
Using words like that imprisons one into a certain perspective. Wealth creation is not "getting a share of the pie". Wealth is not an apple pie you slice up for your guests.
If Picketty uses words like pie, share, transfer, concentration, etc., then his book is about as valueless as Das Kapital.
It does not matter what it's called. The buck stops at the basket of goods and services I can buy. As long as this basket of goods and services is evaluated in inflation adjusted terms, it is pertinent to the discussion we are having.
If we define wealth as it's often used colloquially -- the amount of liquid cash one has -- then your potential share of the pie of goods and services shrinks. This is true unless the pie itself grows proportionately.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with parent comment, the rate of growth of the pie certainly does not feel like it is growing as fast as accumulation of nominal wealth of some.
Historically one usually amassed monetary wealth in exchange of providing goods and services. Stock markets, high frequency arbitrage markets have broken this. Yes there is liquidity insertion, but is that liquidity worth so much ? At microsecond scale ? I don't think so.
Stock market let's one encash a perception of promised future delivery of goods and services without the need to actually deliver it. Yes the market will eventually, hopefully, price it correctly, but by then some other retail sucker is holding that bag.
When people complain about others getting disproportionately wealthy they are talking about the shrinking share of the pie.