The Dead Are Wealthier Than the Living: Capital in the 21st Century - Pacific Standard:... - 0 views
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you needed at least 20 to 30 times the income of the average person, and the most lucrative professions paid only half that
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Consequently, “society” (i.e., the rich) consisted almost entirely of rentiers living off inherited wealth
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But it’s income that mostly interests us, not wealth, because income is the currency of the modern economy. Gone are the days when the only way to acquire an upper-class income was to marry into a family fortune.
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Typically, r is four to five times g, but the ratio gets larger as capital accumulates across generations
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The clearest such pattern is that r really was, at most points in history, greater than g, if only because g was seldom much to write home about, especially back when economies were primarily agricultural. (Inflation, I learned from reading this book, didn’t really exist before the 20th century.)
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really, the 0.01 percent, a cohort Piketty dubs “supermanagers”—to receive much of its remuneration in the form of stock options and other capital holdings.
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“a very large share, perhaps a majority, of corporate profit hinges on rules and regulations that could in principle be altered.”
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Baker also suggests that the tendency for large amounts of capital to realize a higher return isn’t solely attributable to the superior financial instruments they have access to; it may also have something to do with rampant insider trading, which could be policed more closely.
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just in case we get too caught up in determining incomes, disrupting private capital and inheritance needs to be on the agenda. Private goods tend to eventually become public goods (paid a royalty for paper lately?) but the rate at which private goods become public needs to increase (patent reform, inheritance tax etc)