>Wealth is opportunity and political influence. While the political influence of wealth is obviously bad, I think it is a small factor in comparison with econo

>Wealth is opportunity and political influence. While the political influence of wealth is obviously bad, I think it is a small factor in comparison with economic influence. The amount of industry attempting to satiate your desires is proportional to the amount of money you have. Hence the huge disparity between the number of BMW ads on primetime TV and the number of people watching primetime TV that could ever conceivably afford a BMW. The GDP of many countries could be repurposed entirely to serving the desires of the wealthiest few and still not exhaust their purchasing power. In theory, Bill Gates could purchase the entire output of any country smaller than Oman for a year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... This is a factor that globalization proponents don't deal with successfully I think. When a country is isolated, it is only the disparities of wealth within the country that distort the production of the country. Once a country enters global trade it is exposed to many orders of magnitude more of difference in purchasing power. All of the optimality results in economics assume that the current distribution of wealth is optimal (or at least exogenous), hence pareto optima and not any other type. This factor deserves more thought and discussion.