[translocation]

In the US, the top 1% own 35% of the country's total wealth.

[shubb]

But I wonder - if they spent it, would it still have the same value?

Imagine one year, everyone spent all their income on stuff - earned and unearned. How much would an ipad cost? There is a limited capacity to raise ipad production - building new factories takes time. So the cost of an ipad would increase.

Right now, all that wealth is locked up in various markets, increasing the value of property and various past what is rational. If it suddenly came out to play, surely we'd see things people need to live increase more than the poorest can afford.

Is wealth that is never going to be spent really wealth?

[pekk]

This argument is reduced to absurdity because it suggests that everyone will get things cheapest if one Scrooge McDuck accumulates all the wealth and simply sits on it.

[whatshisface]

There's nothing absurd about deflation.

If you took 50% of all the money out of the world, the money that was left would be worth twice as much.

[eli_gottlieb]

That's exactly the argument that was had in the Western world starting with the '70s inflation "crisis", and this was indeed the conclusion people came to: radical inequality is an acceptable price to pay for low inflation. And now we're suffering the consequences of having an overly deflationary labor market.