I know where you're going with this. It's possible to ask the converse question: what happens when everyone has a low-paying job? The answer is that deflation

I know where you're going with this. It's possible to ask the converse question: what happens when everyone has a low-paying job? The answer is that deflation must occur. Home prices must fall, etc. The problem is that deflation is incredibly painful, more painful than inflation. Activist labor is highly inflationary, which in today's debt-overburdened environment is exactly what we (meaning about 99.5% of the population) need. You can make shoulda-coulda-woulda arguments about how we got ourselves into this mess with too much debt, but there's two problems with that. The first is the pragmatic fact that we are here and that populist-driven inflation is the least painful way out. The second is a bit deeper. One thing that's becoming clear from history is that "trickle down" economics does not work. Money does trickle down, but it trickles down in the form of debt. Why engage in entrepreneurial ventures or pay higher salaries when you can lend money at interest with less work required on your end and more assurance of repayment? There's a direct balance sheet correlation between the rich getting richer and everyone else going deeper into debt, since the savings of the rich become the debt of everyone else. I am not, by the way, advocating "socialism" in any dogmatic sense. That IMHO is another discredited dogma. I am advocating pragmatism in lieu of a better idea, since I think all political dogmas are discredited at this point. If you don't have a systematic approach to solving a problem, the only choice you have is between winging it and doing nothing. Doing nothing here will lead back to feudalism. Edit: one more point: Silicon Valley folks have a distorted picture of the rich. California's neuvo riche tech elite are not in the mainstream for their class. In short, your rich people are better than everyone else's rich people. The mere existence of folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shows by virtue of comparison that the vast majority of their socioeconomic contemporaries are merely lucky gamblers who have rationalized their ascent as meritocratic via survivorship bias. If being in the 1% were truly meritocratic we would have a ton of Elon Musks launching a ton of world-changing ventures all the time. Instead we have a bunch of mediocre rich people putting their money in dumb Wall St. funds that do nothing with it but buy government bonds or create more debt (and me-too herd-driven bubbles) for the masses. Heh... I guess another solution would be much smarter and more creative rich people. :P