[AnimalMuppet]

Well, the return on enough capital will always out-earn the return from labor by quite a lot. Labor doesn't scale the way capital does. You can have 10 billion invested instead of 1 billion, but you can't work 80 hours a day.

But more, most of labor is saving single-digit percentages of the return from labor, if they are investing at all. The people who had capital to invest a generation ago, and left it invested for a generation, kind of by definition kept all of that capital invested for a generation.

So I don't think it's as simple as "return from capital > return from labor". (Or maybe I'm demonstrating that it is exactly that, and I'm just thinking of it using different words.)

[randomdata]

> you can't work 80 hours a day.

But you can work for more than one person. Professional athletes and move stars in particular seem to have that figured out quite well, working for many millions, if not billions, of people when they work in a professional capacity. Labour scales quite nicely when doing work that a lot of people want to have done.

Often better than capital, even! The stadium can only hold so many people. He who owns the capital often has less ability to scale than the worker.

[AnimalMuppet]

True - though only for certain types of labor. Entertainment, sports, software, the arts, but not many others.

You can't scale the labor of being on an assembly line, or the labor of being a lawyer or a doctor or a farmer or an auto mechanic. (You may be able to replace them with software, but that's not the same thing.)

(And, yes, you can "scale" them in a way by giving them better tools. A farmer today with a combine is easily 100x a farmer 150 years ago with a sickle - probably more like 1000x. There's not another factor of 10 available to scale them up right now, though, no matter how hard they try.)