IANAEconomist, but I've long arrived at the same conjecture; I usually phrase it as "the market always adjusts to keep average discretionary income at 0". So,

IANAEconomist, but I've long arrived at the same conjecture; I usually phrase it as "the market always adjusts to keep average discretionary income at 0". So, if you give everyone in a given population (I'd go for the country instead of the world to see the effect much faster) a million dollars a month, the average discretionary income would, obviously, rise by one million dollars. That would cause prices to raise, but also all kinds of new products and services to become available. Some of those would evolve from luxuries to necessities over time - like e.g. having a car, or a mobile phone. Housing would likely eat a chunk of the surplus. In the end, it would all stabilize, at exactly the "life is more expensive by a million dollars, on average" point. We'd still have socioeconomic classes - poor with < 0 surplus, rich with > 0 surplus, and the middle with ~0 surplus. Some people would've moved to different places on the ladder, but the ladder would still be there, simply because of variability in individual incomes. I guess put another way, you could say, the market is a DC filter - as wealth distribution in a population changes, the market always adjusts to cancel out the constant component ("DC offset").