[AnthonyMouse]

> I'd imagine history is not going to look kindly on the wealthy.

That's assuming the money is going to the wealthy, which isn't really compatible with things being cheap.

What really happened is that other things -- like housing -- got more expensive. But most of that money didn't go to Bill Gates, it went to grandma when she retired to Florida and sold her house to a millennial for four times what she paid for it in real dollars, whose huge mortgage payment is in turn now eating more than all of the money saved from having crappy tomatoes.

[neom]

The Walton and Mars family net worths exceed $250 billion. If you add in Aldi and Ikea you're over $340 billion, Bezos gives you another $100 billion.

[AnthonyMouse]

Comparing absolute numbers to nothing isn't very meaningful. You compare your $340 billion to the almost a hundred trillion dollars in US total net worth and the amount that went somewhere else is above 99%.

To get to the numbers like "1% of people own 40% of the wealth" you have to go the 1%, which is to say about three million people, and then you're including a bunch of doctors and software engineers who are clearly not in the same box as the Walton and Mars families.

[adrianN]

If you compare 340 billion to the net worth of the median person the mind boggles.

[AnthonyMouse]

Then you're comparing the sum total of the wealth of many of the richest families to that of one individual person.

The fact that rich people have a lot of money is not really a recent development. But it's the focus on the super rich which is missing the thread.

If housing prices go up, people at the 25th percentile lose and people at the 75th percentile gain. We see the loss for the people at the 25th percentile and recognize it as a problem, but then people are pretending like we can just take the money "back" from the Walton family even though that's not where most of it actually went.

It went to home price appreciation for a bunch of middle aged and retired sociologists and car dealership managers and dental hygienists. If you want them to give it back so the poor aren't so poor then you have to recognize that and thereby identify who it is you really have to fight over that money.

[neom]

My point was that Sam Walton didn't seem to exactly price in carbon when he went to market with wal-mart in the 70s. Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation), the same could be true for Ikea tables, Amazon Prime 1 day toothbrush, Sugar and chemicals for candy, Pesticides on crops, Opioids, red meat, etc. We got exactly what we wanted, loads of new cheap stuff with loads of selection at our convenience. We also got a labor crisis, a health epidemic, climate change and massive knowledge and wealth inequality.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Had he, maybe the price and selection would not have resulted in that degree of wealth extraction (generation)

Not really. The profit on buying for $8 and selling for $11 is about the same as on buying for $9 and selling for $12. You make a little less, because there is lower demand and you have higher initial capital costs for inventory, but it's only a marginal difference.

The reason they don't do it regardless is that if Sam Walton tries selling only the carbon-priced thing for $12 when some competitor is selling the bad thing for $11, the customer chooses the lower price. There is still a Walmart-shaped thing in the economy whether or not it's called Walmart and founded by Sam Walton, because most customers choose that over the thing that costs more.

Because they have instant personal feedback into the price and the taste but not into the long-term health effects of sugar and red meat. But if you can solve that for voters then doesn't the same solution work for customers?

[SolaceQuantum]

Wait, ok, I genuinely don't understand your proposition here.

We should ignore the people with the most assets, and only pay attention to the people with the most assets?

[AnthonyMouse]

"The people with the most assets" in aggregate are the upper middle class, lawyers and nurses and chemical engineers, not Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

[bbddg]

The top 3 richest people (Gates, Buffet, Bezos) own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's because the bottom 50% of the country own almost nothing. They rent and have debts. The net worth of the entire bottom quintile is negative -- if you have a dollar in your pocket you don't owe to someone then you have more wealth than the bottom 20% of the country.

[bbddg]

Yeah and what's your point? That's a huge fucking problem.