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Could you please respond to my whole comment rather than cherry picking one thing I said. > wealth doesn't beget wealth The return on an investment in the S&P
by jrock08 11y ago
Could you please respond to my whole comment rather than cherry picking one thing I said.
> wealth doesn't beget wealth
The return on an investment in the S&P 500 over the past 50 years undermines this.
> absence of it does not prevent one from generating wealth.
Prevent is such a strong word. I'm not technically prevented from breaking the longest free-fall record. However, I do not have 1000s of skydives under my belt or connections in the community of record breaking skydiving. While I'm not technically prevented from getting those things, I'm behind the curve compared to someone that has those things.
> the manner in which it produce income inequality is not harmful
But he doesn't really present any real evidence that this is the case. Now, I agree, that some startups produce new wealth as some percentage of the wealth that their founders, investors, and employees reap. But it's obviously always more complicated than that. Take, for example, the Microsoft office suite, which by almost any measure created an immense amount of wealth. However, it also made a large number of jobs obsolete, and thus "redistributed" the wealth from people working typist style jobs. Take for example, smartphones, which again, have created an immense amount of wealth. However, they also allow smaller independent contractors who would otherwise have rented an office space, and hired a secretary, to simply use their smartphone to manage their day, thus "redistributing" some amount of wealth from a lower-middle class job to an upper-middle class job. Now, obviously, I've ignored that maybe, the loss of these jobs created new jobs that the workers who were displaced could do, but given that PGs argument was basically just "We make the pie bigger" with almost no evidence, my argument of "It's really not that simple" with some examples should be at least equally convincing to you.