>Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth, certainly. But a significant number do, and the Baumol Effect means all their peers get dragged alon

>Not everyone who gets rich now does it by creating wealth, certainly. But a significant number do, and the Baumol Effect means all their peers get dragged along too. [23] And as long as it's possible to get rich by creating wealth, the default tendency will be for economic inequality to increase My question is: significantly more wealth seems to be generated by big corporations by means of financial 'instruments' rather than by value creation; is that correct? Also this lecture [1] says that scientific and technological breatkhroughs are much harder to achieve these days - because all the shallow fruit is already taken and it costs more to digg deep. Now doesn't that make value creation harder for the coming decades? (for example the PC revolution was based on breakthroughs in physics/semiconductors/electronics - these will be harder and harder to achieve) So it is hard to tell which one will dominate for the near future: value extraction by means of financial trickery (my guess is that this makes society more hierarchical, and the top of the hierarchy will try to enforce equal standing for the lower ranks) or the possibility of real value creation (this one would create a chance for a wider audience) ? [1] Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI