"When I arrived in the office one day I saw my boss coming in with a new big Porsche. I said to him 'nice car' and he replied 'well, if you continue to work hard and give everything to this company, I might be able to get myself another one for Christmas'"
We keep hearing the argument that government subsidy or protectionist legal barriers are responsible for inequality, but I think it's an inherent feature of capitalism.
Owning the means of production, whether it's a company or factory, land, patents, natural resources, or simply a brand name, give you a share of "monopoloy power" to some extent, and puts you on a different plane to workers.
Your wealth automatically rises with the hard work, creativity and success of those workers, and allows to you to buy ever more "productive assets". The value of which constantly increases to remain beyond average workers' grasp.
This is a universal phenomenon. Gregory Clark has tracked family names in the UK over eight centuries and shown that 'mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies'. The names of the Norman colonizers of England in 1066 still strongly feature in the higher social classes.
The article doesn’t say... How is “the richest 1%” defined? Is it by networth? Yearly total compensation? And at what values must one be to meet the definition?
First it says that it's not managers that are increasing inequality then they say a bunch of businesses that are behind it.
Quote:
Almost all of the growth in top American earners has come from just three economic sectors: professional services, finance and insurance, and health care, groups that tend to benefit from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.
I've never met an individual that offers insurance... it's a corporation. So... if it's not managers the only other thing is the owners of these corporations.
