I'm not sure exactly what new information we're supposed to get from this article: obviously, when the stock market busts, those with the highest exposures to i

I'm not sure exactly what new information we're supposed to get from this article: obviously, when the stock market busts, those with the highest exposures to it are going to be hurt more in percentage terms than those with very little exposure. That this has happened does not indicate any systemic change that's likely to alter the overall concentration of wealth. There are potentially some such systemic changes occurring, of course - the middle-millionaire worker bees in the finance industry (particularly the gamblers...oops, I mean traders :) ) are probably going to see a leaner few years ahead. But the more normal pieces of our economy, where wealth is gained via production instead of positioning, are not changing in any fundamental manner. Re: your comment, I just re-read http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html, and it brought up a very important point regarding distribution of wealth, one that I'd not considered before. It's a real shame that we don't have any numerical way to measure overall wealth level across time periods, all we can do is measure relative distributions at a single time. Trivially, there's got to be an ideal distribution of resources at a given time that will maximize the expected value of total wealth as we move forward (this is true even if that "total wealth" number is calculated with some penalty for massive inequality). But what I hadn't considered before is that this optimal distribution may change significantly as the baseline rises. The usual assumption, one I've been guilty of in the past, is that a constantly shifting distribution of wealth implies that even if we hit that optimum, we're going to move right past it. But it's quite possible that with the leverage of technology coming into play, the distribution that optimizes overall wealth could continue to concentrate a higher and higher percentage of said wealth in fewer hands, and the "steady state" equilibrium that the physicist in me is desperate to solve for is actually shifting upwards over time. I wonder if there are any existing economic models that explicitly account for this effect (not an economist, so I'm not sure); it would be very nice to have a realistic model to see concretely the means by which an income gap might not be such a bad thing for everyone, and to be able to see the relative effect of controlling that gap via taxes. After all, if the net effect of chopping half the income of the top 0.01% of earners is only to reduce the net economic output by .5%, many people would find this to be a fair tradeoff, since there is some societal utility in equity. But if it's going to reduce overall output by 5% to do such a thing, forget it, we're all going to be worse off in the end.