Today’s extremes of wealth and inequality result from the confluence of three historical developments
from David Westbrook and The Inequality Crisis
While we
may find many sorts of inequality in the United States and elsewhere, this essay is about the specific form of inequality exemplified by Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, that is, the Himalayan summits of contemporary wealth, mostly in the United States.
I would like to suggest that such wealth results from the confluence of three historical developments.
First, the social processes referred to under the rubric of “globalization” have created vast markets. A dominant position in such markets leads not only to great wealth, but also to the elimination of peers. Since there are few such markets, relatively significant wealth is possessed by very few people. There is only one Jeff Bezos, one Bill Gates.
Second, digital markets powerfully tend toward monopolization, of both their products and the narrative of the future. Those fortunate enough to be the monopolists profit accordingly, both directly, by doing business, but especially by investor interest.
Third, the actors in such digital markets are generally corporations, which are in turn largely owned by their founders. As a result, a few individuals have acquired almost unbounded wealth, at least as wealth is conventionally measured, nominal US dollars. Conversely, entire economic sectors (like “food” or “data”) are at least nominally under the dominance of such individuals. Political economy has been individualized, at least formally, to an astounding extent. A normative political discussion of this state of affairs is beyond the bounds of this essay.
So where to start? A listing of the ten richest Americans at the end of 2019 is illustrative:
Rank The ten richest Americans Net worth 10 Jim Walton Heir to the fortune of Walmart $51.6 billion 9 Steve Ballmer Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft from 2000- 2014 $51.7 billion 8 Michael Bloomberg Majority owner and co-founder of Bloomberg L.P (software company) $53.4 billion 7 Sergey Brin Co-founder of Google President of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, until 2019
$53.5 billion 6 Larry Page Co-founder of Google President of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, until 2019
$55.5 billion 5 Larry Ellison Co-founder, executive chairman, etc., of Oracle Corporation $65 billion 4 Mark Zuckerberg Co-founder, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder of Facebook $69.6 billion 3 Warren Buffett CEO of Berkshire Hathaway $80.8 billion 2 Bill Gates Co-founder of Microsoft $106 billion 1 Jeff Bezos Founder, CEO, and president of Amazon $114 billion Seven of the ten fortunes are derived from purely digital enterprises (six, if one argues that Bloomberg is also media/information/content, albeit delivered digitally). Amazon sells physical things, and brokers the sale for other sellers, collecting data all the while. Amazon is also a collector and purveyor of personal information, and a seller of cloud services – virtual as opposed to tangible activities. Walmart is a highly digitized global network for the distribution of things, and a provider of some services. In short, nine of the ten fortunes can fairly be said to be derived from “tech”.
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
I think it’s also appropriate to mention tax policy as a contributing factor to obscenely huge fortunes. Back when the marginal tax rate was over 90 percent (during a time of growing general prosperity in the US) such fortunes might have been impossible or nearly so. The arguments for reducing tax rates on extremely high incomes or on capital gains are all bogus, of course, but since rich people control the government in the US (just rich, not grotesquely rich) naturally they support policies that tend to increase their own fortunes.
There are perhaps thousands, certainly hundreds of books, academic papers, projects, monologues, etc. on innovation and being an innovator around today. For business, art, literature, science, etc. They are all about people who do not fit well into current society and change that society through that not fitting. Misfitting is a real phenomenon. Mostly it does not end with positive change to society but often does create negative effects, sometimes deadly effects for the misfits. The writers in this book are not misfits. Otherwise most of what they say and write would be incomprehensible and/or offensive to those who hear and read it. But they do educate us on the social origins of many, perhaps most of the problems people in the world are living with today. In the words of the authors, they attempt to educate us about the actors in our society today who monopolize the narrative of the future. Sociologist C. Wright Mills noted and described this phenomenon nearly 60 years ago.
What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide [today world-wide] societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.
Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change? (The Sociological Imagination, pp. 3-4)
As we see now after considering the work of Mills (and others) what is described in this book is not new. Some of the underlying details are different, as we would expect with the changes over time. But the notion of not just overt control but the surreptitious rewriting of history and new writing of the future at the personal level is an old story for humans. Gates’, Bezos’, etc. methods and motives may be different but pursuit of full command of people’s lives through choosing the norms and values that define them is not. The authors need to acknowledge the history of the study of these ways of life and then use the insights of scholars such as Mills. Including how to stop it happening and change the results when it does.