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I've recently come to the conclusion that any society where it is easier for the rich become richer than it is for the poor to become richer, regardless of its

• jonknee 11y ago
  You should read Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. It deals with this concept extensively.
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Seconded for Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
  • forinti 11y ago
    This is an interesting book. It gives a different angle on the ideia in Yanis Varoufakis' book The Global Minotaur which is that money has to circulate in order for the economy to function with stability. You just can't let it pile up too much in one place.
    • yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Most of the wealth held by the rich isn't money failing to circulate. It's productive capacity producing goods for others. Elon Musk's wealth isn't a vault full of gold coins. It's a factory producing cars that other people get to drive. Piketty's book describes this phenomenon as well - his book is fundamentally about the world moving from a situation of having a $1M factory producing $100k in income to a situation of a $2M factory producing $150k in income. (I.e., r=2, g=1.5.)
      • Florin_Andrei 11y ago
        > Elon Musk's wealth isn't a vault full of gold coins. Elon is one of the very few people who put their money to excellent use. But for every Elon Musk out there, there are hundreds of Paris Hiltons.
        • yummyfajitas 11y ago
          It's Paris Hilton, the self-made millionaire you are referring to, right? The one disowned by her family, but who leveraged an entertaining personality into her own brand of fashion and and entertainment products? From what I can tell, most of her wealth is in the form of jewelry production and sales. Had she kept her inherited wealth it would be mostly in the form of hotels rather than money.
          • Locke1689 11y ago
            The parent I think is clearly going down the wrong road. Almost by definition, if you've heard of the person to cite then they have an outsized impact on wealth circulation. The people to look at are, say, Peter Oppenheimer, former CFO of Apple (picked at random). I'm sure his net worth is in the hundreds of millions and he has a few very nice houses -- but what's the likelihood that a significant portion of his wealth is reintroduced into the economy? I really know nothing about him, so maybe I'm being unfair and he spends lavishly on yachts and mansions, or is an angel investor in 100s of startups, but I think the prototypical Fortune 500 C-level is probably someone who lives very well, but not lavishly and not up to their very generous means. I should also note I'm excluding passive investment in mutual or hedge funds for the sake of argument, but I'm not sure whether they produce sufficient results to count as "reintroducing" money into the market.
            • yummyfajitas 11y ago
              It's highly unlikely that Oppenheimer is sitting on large piles of cash. Most likely his wealth is again in productive assets - e.g. shares of SPY. As an owner of shares of SPY, he then owns small percentages of factories, airplanes, hotels, logistics and similar things. Virtually no one is actually sitting on money because that's a really dumb thing to do. Investing in productive capacity just provides a lot more money.
  • danharaj 11y ago
    Not to mention Capital itself. Whether or not you agree with it, and its historiography is mostly proved bunk by now, its analysis has value. The linked article is kind of boring because it explicitly does not analyze the structural conditions of capitalism which make the phenomena it criticizes inevitable. You can't fight these trends within the framework of capitalism.
    • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      I tend to rely ( probably too much ) on Adam Smith for my ideas about capitalism, and so far as they go these phenomena are not that. Specifically land leads to Ricardian rents, and historical examples of taxing land rents abound. Japan went from medeviel backwater to industrial giant in ... decades through the use of land taxation. At some point, they decided the classical Japanese values were more important and that is when the industrialists took over as an update to the Samurai and the rest is history. I don't blame them - classical/medieval Japanese culture is extraordinarily beautiful. But the Bushido Code does not mix with machine guns. Generally, capitalism if practiced by ... Vulcans or robots would not result in most of what we attribute to it as ills. But humans love to cheat, and the cost of prosecuting all that cheating is probably too high. We also seem unable to develop a media culture that does not fawn all over the rich and powerful. Actual Capitalist ethics emphasize consumer surplus most of all. Whether the externalities are what we think they are is a much richer discussion. Quite difficult. It is important to realistically believe you are serving your fellow man in this way.
      • Kalium 11y ago
        Our media culture seems to have two modes - aspiration and spite. Either we aspire to be like more "successful" people or we spite them for being more "successful" than us. I suspect this maps well to an ingroup/outgroup divide.
      • zo1 11y ago
        >"We also seem unable to develop a media culture that does not fawn all over the rich and powerful." They get the opposite as well. I've seen so much sheer, unreasoned hatred of the rich, simply for being rich. Almost as if it is assumed that they only got that way by some illegal/immoral means. Then, you get the other half of that side of the coin. That even if the rich did earn their money using legal/ethical means, they don't deserve it (or to keep/use it). It's inherent in all discussions of wealth inequality. Really, it's not enough to just let it be, but everyone wants to play social-engineer with progressively richer individuals. One additional thing, that you can see running in this discussion. That legality is not somehow an indicator of fairness/justice. A few commentators here have noted that rich people use tax "holes" and legal financial constructs to "evade" tax, as if it's a bad thing, and as if it's not something that was put in place by legal, democratic means. At this point, I'm inclined to believe that these individuals are content with circular reasoning because none of these points can be proven by themselves, and rather always rely on some other piece of the landscape to deflect critique.
• gefh 11y ago
  This is one of the arguments in favor of inheritance/estate taxes - they should have a distributive effect that prevents the formation of a nobility or royal class. Of course, no-one with enough foresight actually ens up paying a significant amount these days.
  • harryh 11y ago
    Americans paid 19 billion in inheritance taxes in 2014.
    • smtddr 11y ago
      In comparison to what? And exactly what income-levels paid what percentage of that? Did the poor & middle class paid 98% of of that? Did the rich & powerful use all kinds of crazy tax-loop-holes to avoid paying trillions? Cost of living/retirement in what parts of America?....maybe 19 billion is a drop in the ocean, maybe not. 19 billion tells me nothing.
      • harryh 11y ago
        Well, roughly 2.6 million Americans died in 2014. I've read that 1 in 500 estates gets taxed so that's about 5200 estates. 19 billion / 5200 = an mean of ~3.65 million per taxed estate. That's all I know off the top of my head. In general I've found the trope of "the rich don't pay taxes because of their fancy lawyers and accountants" generally turns out to be false.
        • smtddr 11y ago
          >>In general I've found the trope of "the rich don't pay taxes because of their fancy lawyers and accountants" generally turns out to be false. It's not that they don't pay taxes at all, but they definitely pay less than they should. http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/ http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta... There's no way you can believe otherwise, a millionaire can afford all kinds of financial experts to work 40hrs/week to move money all over the place to avoid taxes. It's unreasonable to think they don't (ab)use that ability.
• JulianMorrison 11y ago
  Also: Any economic system that can be modeled as a random walk of dollars between nodes representing human/corporations who come out unequal winners on transactions, will generate a distribution curve of inequality, and your rules one and two will automatically amplify this into feudalism. That's just what money does on its own (and this laughs in the face of "meritocracy"). Redistribution through tax can be seen as "baling the water back out of the boat" in this context: it pulls money away from the rich, but doesn't prevent it continuing to rush back to them. It's a thankless never-ending job and politically motivated interruptions in "baling" will immediately result in inequality growing again. I'm with the Zeitgeist Movement on this: money as a Thing needs to go away. It's intrinsically harmful.
  • joshuaheard 11y ago
    If you do away with money, what will you use as a medium of exchange of the value of production?
    • JulianMorrison 11y ago
      You don't. You run the scutwork of the economy with automation, robots, etc, which provides a basic living for nothing, and let people pursue their vocations. The process for handling large allocations of resources is left as an exercise, but I'd favour direct democracy via recursive vote delegation ("liquid democracy"), at the most local possible scope (following the principle of subsidiarity).
      • prodmerc 11y ago
        You are severely underestimating the need for people to interact. People love to have subordinates (i.e. someone to boss around), and people love to be subordinates (i.e. have someone tell them what to do). Being free to do what you want is great, but most people don't know what they want, yet they have a natural disposition/desire/urge to lead or follow, and most definitely interact.
        • 11y ago
• nugget 11y ago
  There are some interesting social trends at work here. One of the most interesting to me is the concept of Assortive Mating. This is the idea that 30 years ago a physician, for example, would likely marry a nurse, or an executive would likely marry his secretary. Whereas today, the physician marries the executive and the nurse marries the secretary instead. Rather than pair one high and one low income/wealth/status individual together and reduce overall inequality, the gap (financially, socially, and culturally) is now widened even more. And of course this inequality is very likely to impact the next generation because the well educated, high income parents (now with more uniformly high income extended families) tend to give a higher level of attention, resources, and support to their children compared to the children of the poor, working, and middle classes.
  • gaius 11y ago
    They tried to do this deliberately in the early 20th century, incentivise college professors to breed and so on. Events transpired to make eugenics programmes unacceptable however.
    • chc 11y ago
      I think nugget's point wasn't about eugenics so much as discouraging the concentration of wealth in specific groups.
    • CodeCube 11y ago
      hahaha, really? I'm curious, is there any writings or media on this phenomenon? was it similar to the danish "Do it for mom" campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B00grl3K01g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B00grl3K01g)?
  • beachstartup 11y ago
    there is quite a bit of politically impolite theorizing on the internet these days about the rise of women in the academic and business contributing to the decline of marriage and rise in inequality (as a whole). i.e. women don't marry down, and men are falling further behind.
• oldmanjay 11y ago
  Money is just a proxy for power, and there has literally never been a society where it is easier for the powerless to become powerful than it is for the powerful to accrue more power. The "best" you can do to prevent the powerful from accruing power is consolidate all meaningful power as tightly as possible, which history teaches us is a recipe for misery.
  • nostrademons 11y ago
    Umm, every revolution in history is an example of the powerless becoming more powerful. We (in the U.S. at least) are not still subjects of the English Crown, and indeed many people look at the monarchy as a joke these days. If you look at which families are powerful now vs. who was powerful 150 years ago, there's a huge disparity. I think that when people say "It's impossible for the powerless to become powerful", they really mean "It's very unlikely for me to become powerful", which is statistically true. Powerful people are rare - that's what it means to be powerful - and so no matter how much mobility there is at the top, the odds of any one person making it there are quite slim.
    • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      And yet the irony is that some of the freest countries around with high HDI and GDP are constitutional/ceremonial monarchies. And then you have luxurious and prosperous microstates like Monaco and Liechtenstein which are both democratic yet retaining monarchs who actively exercise their executive powers. Then there's the controversial question of whether a monarchy's efficacy may in fact be greater than that of a republic, a topic that authors such as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have explored.
      • nostrademons 11y ago
        There are a lot of ironies when it comes to power. Another big one, relating to the article under discussion, is that it's by the CEO of a company dedicated to taking money from the poor and giving it to startup founders so that they may become rich. I think a lot of the confusion is because power operates as a hierarchy (or oftentimes, a graph), and each layer of the hierarchy tends to oppress the layer below it while itself being oppressed by the layer above. Hence you had poor blacks in Reconstruction being oppressed by the KKK (largely composed of poor white sharecroppers), who were being oppressed by the Northern bourgeoisie, who were being oppressed by Gilded Age industrialists who were being oppressed by populist politicians who were allied with the poor white sharecroppers. That's why you may have a monarchy with strong support from the common people: the monarchy keeps wealthy business owners in line, which keeps them from oppressing ordinary citizens. It also explains the current political situation in the U.S, where the Republican party is an uneasy coalition of wealthy plutocrats, small business owners, and poor rural religious whites, while the Democratic party is an uneasy coalition of academics, white Yuppies, unionized black factory workers, and immigrant Hispanics. The plutocrats oppress the yuppies, who offend the small business owners, who oppress the immigrants, who take jobs away from the rural poor, who discriminate against blacks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIlJ8ZCs4jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIlJ8ZCs4jY
• vegabook 11y ago
  History tends to support your conclusion, but most of the time high concentration of wealth leads to social instability and then (bloody) revolt, overthrow of whichever 1% runs the show at the time. Then the (+/- 70-100 year) cycle starts again. It seems it's best to be born about 10-20 years after each of these crises (see Baby Boomers). It's worst to be born just before / during such societal quakes and unfortunately, we seem to be on the cusp of a new one now. I would add that that before the change occurs, there is inevitably a long period of oppression first as the privileged try to defend their positions, with increasing amounts of suppressive behaviour. We see that already with the surveillance society in which anybody who might challenge the current powers will be branded a terrorist, and even in the economic policy of QE which has the main effect of supporting the financial interests of the wealthy incumbents.
• drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Except the US is rolling in wealth and has real class mobility. Countries with top-level hoarding like many in South America countries or oligarchies like Russia are better examples. I know HN is US-centric and all its criticisms centered on the US, but its asinine to use the US as an example of "feudalism" when we're seeing much, much worse elswhere. With a 5.5% unemployment rate and median household income of $55k, there's a lot of opportunity. France, and other Euro states, has twice the unemployment rate and almost half the household income. Yet it always gets a free pass in these discussions. In Russia 111 people control 19 percent of all wealth. This is a country with a $1.5T GDP and 145m people! One fifth of it controlled by a mere 111 men? Yes somehow Russia also gets a free pass during these discussions. Hell, in Brazil the bottom 10% of the population lives on about $1 a day and the top 10% owns almost half of the wealth! Yeah, a lot of countries have fallen into near feudalism, but the US isn't one of them. At least its not the best example for breathless exposes of wealth inequility.
  • lumberjack 11y ago
    Pretty sure France and most EU states have higher class mobility than the US most entirely due to much more accessible education and larger welfare states. http://www.oecd.org/eco/labour/49849281.pdf http://www.oecd.org/eco/labour/49849281.pdf
    • SandersAK 11y ago
      maybe in the last few decades, but increasingly unemployment is rising in Europe.
  • sammydavis 11y ago
    The US hasn't fallen into feudalism, but it is increasingly much harder for people with interest and capabilities to get to college because of the cost - unless their own parents "gifted them" with a good edu & economic background. I went to a moderately good southern university but was able to get a phd in cs, and then was able to work for many of the leading tech companies in the world (like facebook, google, microsoft or amazon). I followed in the footsteps of my parents, both of whom had college degrees. If instead I was the first person in my family to make it to college, and my parents had been uneducated or suffered from being drug addicted, or I had gone to a terrible public school, it would have been tremendously harder for me to succeed. And I can help my own kids to succeed. Your parent's educational and economic background is a huge factor in your personal success. We should strive to make it so that intelligent people with interest can succeed (educationally and personally), and strive to make it so that people see this is an opportunity not preserved for the rich. We should not (as someone suggested) make it society work such that wealth is randomly moved between people, as then there would be no benefit to learning and trying to better the world; somehow this has to be balanced with a good and decent life for everyone, people shouldn't just die if they don't happen to have health care (or their parents are poor).
• OtherTiberius 11y ago
  I think about this quite a bit and haven't come to a solution. In a truly equal society every person would have equal opportunity and achievement. For example, if x% of the population are in college then a child should have x% probability of going to college regardless of his parent's income and other factors. In modern day America it's probably something like the below (using made up numbers): Upper class: 95% probability of child going to college Middle class: 65% probability of child going to college Lower Class: 30% probability of child going to college This is just one example but I believe the same concept can be used for myriad situations. This is going to create a huge cycle of inequality that will widen as the economy grows and those with money can exert power and influence to maintain their power and influence, create a feedback cycle. From reading other comments it sounds like the new "Capital" book is some interesting reading on this subject.
  • nugget 11y ago
    Of the 30% of lower class kids who go to college, how many are successful in the ways they want to be? A lower class kid who wants to become a doctor should have the same opportunities as anyone else and we should work hard to support them. But I see kids all the time who majored in communications or social studies (not kidding) and came out with $40k in student debt (half of which was spent on inflated rent and social activities). They had no guidance from their typically lower class parents beyond ''go to college'' because that is what society has been drilling into their collective heads for 30 years. We need to fundamentally rethink how to set up vocational pathways and training for young people, not try to push more of them into a system that is increasingly failing.
    • chillwaves 11y ago
      Story of my life.. sadly my parents just had no real concept of professional jobs, let alone connections or the experience to guide me into such a world. Eventually I wised up and took the IT path, but it was after I wasted college getting a worthless BA. On the bright side, I grew up just before the internet got big and kids today seem much sharper, so I hold out hope for the next generation.
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  In absolute terms the poor get richer by doing absolutely nothing. Being poor today is objectively superior than being poor 25, 50, 100, or 200 years ago. So I suppose your conclusion is we're doing it right? Well alrighty then.
  • branchless 11y ago
    I can never understand this mentality. Can I keep you in terrible living conditions "because it's better than 30BC"? Judgement on inequality has to be relative to the here and now.
    • forrestthewoods 11y ago
      You'll have to objectively define "terrible living conditions" on an international level. But sure. Go ahead. Issue your judgement. I'm curious.
    • SHIT_TALKER 11y ago
      We don't determine "poverty" by living conditions but income. As someone who tries to "earn" as little as possible for tax-protest reasons, I can vouch for the parent commenter's statement. By picking the right location and work, I'm able to support a family on $20K (AGI) per year. The used cars I buy in cash get better every time I need to get another one. As people in my area moved to bigger houses in the perimeter of the city, I was able to buy a nice Victorian-era home with plenty of room for just north of the annual median U.S. income. (And I don't have a mortgage.) The home's location is easily walkable to schools, stores, shops, doctors, etc. My "living conditions" are really pretty great just making do with the castoff affluence around me. Yet my income level is considered by the federal government to be below the "poverty level". And compared to my great-grandparents, who were successful subsistence farmers, I'd say I have it pretty damn great as my "living conditions" are far superior to theirs, even though my "relative" poverty is greater.
    • nostrademons 11y ago
      Why? Why is it better to compare yourself to the guy down the street than to compare yourself to your past self of 10 years ago? I've usually tried to compare myself vs. who I was 10 years ago, not to the people around me, and I suspect I've ended up significantly happier (and quite possibly wealthier) because of it.
• calebm 11y ago
  I believe you've happened upon a law of Psychohistory :)
• hammock 11y ago
  I see evidence that inequality is rising, however do you have evidence that "the rich" is a consistent group over time and not subject to change? As a counter example, it's incredible to compare the abject poverty of, e.g. Asian immigrants to the US with the relative wealth of their first-generation American children. That's happening alongside rising inequality, but it's definitely not "the rich getting richer."
  • samscully 11y ago
    The Great Gatsby curve [1] suggests that increasing inequality may lead to lower social mobility. The further apart the rungs are on the ladder, the harder it is to climb. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve
• branchless 11y ago
  Wages lag production so debt is required. The banks in this article are everywhere because they have a monopoly on credit creation and demand interest. Take 5 minutes to read this, it articulates what the author failed to (and as a result reached a conclusion of little use): http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/view/it-s-time-for-an-economic-copernican-turn http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/view/it-s-time-for-an-... Think of the banks everywhere. They are today's churches. Big spacious lobbies. Stand in awe not at the creativity but at the sheer amount of high value real-estate they can waste. The guy writing this article doesn't understand the wider dynamics at all. It's about money creation and the use of that to ramp land prices in order to compel everyone to hand over part of their labour. As you note if you have money you can get more of it because you can leverage it. But that's only part of the picture. I'd encourage everyone to read the above link and also Henry George "progress and poverty" http://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depressions-Increase/dp/0911312587 http://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depression...
  • iamsohungry 11y ago
    > Wages lag production so debt is required. An alternative would be for wages to not lag production, and for the ultra-rich to make less money.
    • branchless 11y ago
      This isn't what social credit is about. Even if you add up all the wages that go to the rich it's still less than the value of the goods produced, hence the need for debt to fill the gap. I agree I'd like to see far less inequality BTW.
  • ZenoArrow 11y ago
    The ideas of social credit definitely have some merit, though I think it's important to flesh out how it would be implemented, as there are clearly risks if it's implemented poorly. For example, how would you guard against over-consumption? Would be interested to hear your thoughts on the Positive Money campaign, I believe you'll be interested in it. http://positivemoney.org/ http://positivemoney.org/
• pasbesoin 11y ago
  I wonder whether people these days don't receive a definition and education about "capitalism" akin to that I which I and my contemporaries received -- average though it may have been and dim as it is in my mind, these many years later. "Capitalism" emphasizes (take this as a principle, or principal -- regardless of truth) the primacy of capital in production -- and, by extension, ownership. Labor, et al. are not capital. Land, factories, machinery: Those are capital. What happens when capitalism becomes unmitigated and ownership concentrated? Only those who have the capital, can produce. And the more capital they control, the more production they control -- the more power they have. And for some, that power, and being at the pinnacle of the hierarchy, are more important than the absolute progress of the community. (Understand, too, that this is not simply some cartoon-esque "power for power's sake" quest. It leads, overall, to better life, greater health, and better outcomes for one's offspring and friends.) There are many people with much potential and many good ideas, who are not allowed the resources with which to pursue them. This is where that community needs to curtail unbridled capitalism. (The "rising tide that lifts all boats" may lead to a better collective outcome. To greater absolute progress. But also, perhaps, to less control, advantage, and security at the top.) And this is why you never want all of your resources, production, and knowledge to reside under the control of a single authority, nor anything overly approaching such. We aren't all equivalent (i.e. the same, as opposed to some qualitative assessment of "equal"). And we do enhance our abilities by forming organized structures. But no absolute hierarchy has demonstrated the ability to maximize potential -- neither in us nor in biology.
• JonFish85 11y ago
  What I don't get about this argument (and others similar to it) is that the US seems to have a pretty good turnover of money. According to Forbes' billionaires list, "[f]ully 1,191 members of the list are self-made billionaires, while just 230 inherited their wealth"[1]. The top 3 richest people on the planet at this point made their money themselves, and 2 of them (Gates & Buffett) are not going to pass their wealth down the family tree. We're less than 100 years from one of the richest people of all time, JD Rockefeller (net worth ~$300+bn). His family is essentially dedicated to giving that money away at this point, and I believe the family's net worth at this point is in the $15bn range--not peanuts, but hardly growing. Money doesn't last, but there are always rich people. Paris Hilton, trust fund baby, has made more money from her own businesses than she'd ever inherit from her grandfather. Same with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. But after a couple of generations, the old money is usually gone. As much as people like to complain about "the rich", there really aren't as many generationally-rich people as some make it seem. [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2015/03/02/inside-the-2015-forbes-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2015/03/02/inside-th...
  • andosa 11y ago
    That doesn't really refute gp's point. In medieval times, there were periods where dynasties didn't last, and every generation had new warlords from new families. That doesn't mean it wasn't a feudal society.
  • Swizec 11y ago
    The main issue, as I see it, is that going from upper middle class (or even mid-range middle class) to mega rich is easier than it is to go from poor to lower middle class. Most rags to riches stories we have these days, are really a relatively well off to riches stories when you look at them. The only exceptions are people who won the celebrity lottery. It's surprisingly hard to accumulate wealth when you're struggling to keep the lights on.
    • rnovak 11y ago
      Why wouldn't it be easier? Someone who has more discretionary income can take on more risk than someone who can't keep their lights on, and a failed venture doesn't have the same consequences. Just by virtue of taking more risk, those in the middle class are expanding their chance of success by orders of magnitude more. I'd dare say it's impossible for the middle class to not to become "mega rich" at a greater incidence than poor becoming middle class.
• RangerScience 11y ago
  Totally applies to corporations. Applies to any entity capable of pooling and growing wealth. People, families, institutions, social groups... Let's call it "super-critical" and "sub-critical". Super-critical is always-positive wealth growth rates, no matter quantity of wealth. This will then always occur (or, according to theory, should always occur). If it's always sub-critical, then you don't have wealth growth, because it never makes sense. I think maybe. So what you want is a transition point at which in order to "grow personal wealth" what you actually have to do is grow /other/ people's wealth (who are below that point)... but then it becomes growing power (social connections and allegiances) rather than monetary power (wealth). And because monetary wealth is actually possible to quantify and thus measure, account for, examine, track, etc - it's arguably better, as we call use of that power "corruption". In which case the only known solution is the periodic upheaval.
  • RangerScience 11y ago
    Hmm. Which then leads me to think - Is there a way to institutionalize the periodic upheaval? Or at least prevent the violence and/or civilizational collapse? But, wasn't that part of the point of the US system - getting closer to a periodic / on-going non-violent revolution?
  • mindcrime 11y ago
    Applies to any entity capable of pooling and growing wealth. People, families, institutions, social groups... Yes, but not to an absolute degree. Go back and look at a list of the "Fortune 500" (or something equivalent) from, say, 1900. I believe you'll find that most of those companies no longer even exist at all. Likewise if you enumerate a list of the richest people in the world from that era, their grand-children (or great grand children, whatever) aren't necessarily in corresponding positions in the modern "richest people in the world" list. One thing that the discussions often seem to neglect to consider, is the impact of disruptive (sorry, it's the only word that made sense here) technological change. New technologies come along and create a sort of "upheaval" (something like Schumpeterian "creative destruction") that "resets" things periodically. There are also "dis-economies" of scale where size works against a firm's ability to grow larger and more profitable.
• wyager 11y ago
  People die and are victims of circumstance.
• tn13 11y ago
  I dont think that is true at all. This sort of extrapolation is mostly based on our mental heuristics which turn out to be false because we fail to account for several other factors that might be affecting poor and rich. For example I would love to be a poor person in today's American which rich are richer than a poor person 30 years ago. The fact that rich people get rich basically suggest accelerated pace of development that brings down cost of living for everyone including the poor. Even though the average income of a poor family in United states might not have grown substantially in last 30 years, what they can afford for that money has changed a lot. Money <=> Power is not true unless government interferes too much in Economy. In USA however that is happening in the name of helping poor.
• pjc50 11y ago
  This is what Piketty's "r > g" is about: if the return on capital is greater than overall growth, then the returns of that growth are going disproportionately to the richest.
• baddox 11y ago
  Isn't your premise only true if it's impossible or very hard (in absolute terms, not relative to rich people) for poor people to get richer? "Feudalism," while not being very well-defined as far as I know, implies that the lower class has a low quality of life.
• amalcon 11y ago
  Money is really just an abstraction layer on top of power, which makes #2 tautological and reduces #1 to: power => more power Phrased in this way, it's unsurprising that most societies have this property.