[pg]

(without any research, my hunch is a small portion)

It wouldn't have taken long to test that hunch.

http://www.forbes.com/wealth/forbes-400/list

The superrich basically consist of company founders, their kids, and hedge fund managers. So unless your dark conspiracy = hedge funds (in which case why not just say so?), there's no evidence of it.

[pringle]

Come on. I think you very well know that the superrich class being discussed is more than just the Forbes 400. It's about the top 1% or 5%. There's a whole lot of room beneath these 400 people that take up space in this class of superrich that has grown in the past 30 years at the expense of everyone else. The Forbes list just validates that the way to make the absolute most money is to start a company. And that's great. But again, irrelevant.

Here's some quick research you could've done to test YOUR hunch:

"These numbers actually understate the wealth of America’s top 1 percenters. Each Fed Survey of Consumer Finances, as Kennickell notes, specifically excludes from the survey sample any of the people wealthy enough to make the most recent Forbes 400 list of America’s richest. In 2007, the Forbes 400 held a collective net worth of $1.5 trillion.

But in 2007, even without the fortunes of the Forbes 400, the top 1 percent still held a whopping 33.8 percent of America's total family wealth. Families in the bottom 90, all together, only held 28.5 percent."

http://www.alternet.org/story/137540/solving_the_mystery_of_...

As for any dark conspiracy, I'll say it again -- just because it isn't a part of your reality doesn't mean it isn't real.

[lotharbot]

I want to call your attention to a recent survey about wealth distribution [0] in which the average Bush voter stated that the ideal would be for the poorest quintile to have 7% of the wealth and the richest to have 35% of the wealth (Kerry voters said 12/30). Now, a thought experiment: imagine every family had the exact same income and the exact same rate of wealth accumulation. This is definitely more favorable to the poor and less favorable to the rich than you'd expect from the average Bush voter, or even the average Kerry voter. The only way to be wealthier than someone else is to have been working for more years. But if you do the math, you find that under this system, the richest quintile hold 36% of the wealth and the poorest hold 4% of the wealth. In other words, this system that both Bush and Kerry voters would consider extreme in promoting equality actually provides more wealth inequality than either Bush or Kerry voters emotionally believed was appropriate.

Point being, the people surveyed clearly didn't have a principled reason for thinking 30-35% was an "appropriate" amount of wealth for the top quintile; they hadn't done the math. In light of this, I want to ask you: do you have a principled argument as to how much wealth the top 1% or 5% or 20% should have?

[0] http://www.slate.com/id/2268872/

[pg]

The Forbes 400 list isn't just company founders. It's founders, inheritors, and speculators. Do you have any reason for believing the mix of wealth sources changes as you go further down the list? In fact, do you have any specific rich person or type of rich person in mind that would be an example of the conspiracy?

[pringle]

Yes, I do. I think it's pretty logical to assume that you would begin to see many more money managers and executives as you go down the list. But I don't really see what that's getting at.

The point is that the same people doing the same things are getting much more than they used, and it's a direct result of actual policy changes. I'm not sure why identifying these people as individuals and professions is all that relevant. But do I think that tech entrepreneurs are a minority in those few million people? Yes. Call me crazy.

I think the real question is: Do you have reason to believe that the pretty well-documented overhaul of tax, monetary, and regulatory policy that has taken place in this country over the last few decades didn't actually happen?

If so, that's a conspiracy I'd love to hear about.

[lobo_tuerto]

What about El Chapo Guzmán?

[ootachi]

The article defines the super-rich as the top 1%. 300M * 1% = 3,000,000. The Forbes 400 is 400 out of the 3,000,000 super-rich, hardly a representative sample.

Instead I'd prefer to turn to studies of social class, such as Thompson & Hickey 2005 [1]. This study defines the upper-class as "largely constituted by the heirs to multi-generational fortunes".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class#Thompson_.26_Hicke...