As capitalism matures, it's clear to anyone with a thread of financial literacy that most wealth is created through capital gains rather than salary. We're approaching a state (at least in developed countries) where productivity is so high, that you can literally park your money in 500 of the biggest businesses and you're almost guaranteed a 7% annual return (if you hold stocks for the long term).<p>Using the commonly accepted safe withdraw rate of 4%, if you inherit $3 million (which is not even that much), you can safely collect $120,000 of capital gains/dividend income every year without <i>doing anything</i>. This also frees you up to work on other things that will acquire you even more wealth. People whose parents didn't leave them a large inheritance have to rely on salary, which is taxed at a higher rate and more difficult to earn.<p>In effect, late stage capitalism becomes the anti-thesis of the spirit of capitalism - devoid of competition, free innovation, and upward mobility. In an ideal capitalism society, the most talented should earn the most, but the compounding effect of capital makes it so that whoever holds wealth the longest earns the most.
This article provides paragraph after paragraph of supporting data that the richest have gotten richer, but none that I can see supporting its claim that “billions of poorer people across the world have seen their wealth standstill or decline”.
There was an interesting study posted (I believe here) on how a flat 10% re-distribution (10% taxed from everyone, then redistributed evenly across everyone, aka basic income), created a more stable "society" in simulation. It did this by helping support a larger "middle class". Does anyone know the link/can point me to the study? Google is failing me at the moment...
$1tn / 500 = $2 bn<p>$2 bn / 7.6 billion = 0.263<p>Another way to think about it is that the 500 oligarchs of the world were able to capture a worldwide average of 26.63¢ from <i>each</i> person. In the course of 365 days it's as though each person in the world bought each of the 500 oligarchs in the world a full $0.26/$1.50 = nearly 1/5th of a single vending machine 20 ounce bottle of coke. Multiply that by 500 and you can have a very proper sit-down meal anywhere in the world.<p>Of course, maybe they generated $500, or $1000, or $3,000 in wealth to do so.<p>After all, the worldwide real income increased by well over twice that.<p>But it's that fifth of a bottle of coke that bothers me, personally. Why should bill gates get a quarter from me? He obviously didn't work for it as much as I did. If anything <i>he</i> should be paying <i>me</i>. Why, you ask?<p>What did I make that he uses? Why, I might as well ask: what do the 500 oligarchs of the world make that anyone uses - wait, don't answer that, I have a point to make here and it would kind of ruin it to know the answer.<p>My point is, the rich need to stop getting richer. It's just not right.<p>/s<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/global-wage-report/2016/lang--en/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/global-wag...</a>
> advisers to the super-rich are warning them of a “strike back” from the squeezed majority<p>That's an understatement. When revolutions come, the rich are always the first at the guillotine.<p>Of course, that's rather unlikely, but these people have so much money that they can afford to make that consideration.
This isn't interesting at all, and should not be a headline in a respectable newspaper. The wealth gains are on par with market gains. The absolute dollar value of the gains is almost certainly not headline worthy. The richest individuals lost trillions a few years ago in the crash, they gain trillions in a boom. That's exactly what one would expect.<p>I'm fiercely opposed to the regressive turn the economy has taken, but I'm just as fiercely opposed to hysterical garbage journalism. We won't correct the broken social contract by heaping nonsense upon injustice.<p>I'm all ears for constructive policies to tie earnings for the least wealthy to market gains, since the real problem is lack of ability to invest wages in the market, but I don't see that on offer here.
If the wealthy had any interest in self-preservation, they would advocate higher taxes on themselves or some sort of UBI. But I'm sure Sam Walton's kids think they deserve everything they have.
That's how it is when the Federal Reserve creates an asset bubble to deal with an asset bubble collapse.<p>This is NOT something a capitalist country should be doing. It's not the job of government to make your investments work out. It's YOURS.
A small percentage of bank accounts should be randomly swapped each year, and the owners of the swapped accounts become part of a reality TV show to follow how they dealt with their change of fortune
Curious are the ways in which a world born of binary, "carries over" and manifests the very same patterns in broader social settings, into seemingly unrelated levels of abstraction. Similarity across scales.<p>Binary winner-take-all, all-or-nothing markets?<p>There seem to be deeper natural forces at play; the proposed <i>evil divide</i> between the rich and poor just incidental symptom. Surface ripples in a powerful river.
So what? Inequality should only matter to you personally if it means the lower bound on income, the poorest of the poor, is going down. If the richest is getting richer, maybe that means the poorest are becoming poorer as a consequence, but not necessarily, in fact, most likely not.
Top 500 YouTubers see their subscribers_count increase by 100 million this year. Meanwhile, I got 0 increase in subscribers. It's not fair!<p>Just imagine how much influence these popular YouTubers have compared to regular folks, the impact they have on cultural and political life. Should we allow a tiny group of YouTubers to have such a massive subscribers_count and influence?<p>I say NO! Behind every popular YouTube channel lies a great crime.
In other words, the 500 wealthiest people added a trillion dollars of value to the economy this year.<p>Edit: you all that are down-voting need to learn how the economy works.