An economist named Blair Fix has written a piece illustrating the scope of our society's vastly growing inequality. Of course, you probably already knew about that, but he shows how bad it really is — and how it continues getting worse. 
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The rich get richer.

It’s a phrase that packs a lot of punch. It’s potent rhetoric, yet surprisingly accurate at describing how rising inequality plays out.

Of course, there’s nothing inevitable about the rich getting richer. We just happen to live in an age of growing corporate despotism. 

The Forbes 400 got a lot richer over the last forty years. But so what? It could be that over the same period, all Americans got richer. In that case, it’s not particularly meaningful to say that the rich got richer. Everyone got richer.

Except they didn’t.

It turns out that unlike the Forbes 400, the average American saw little change in their net worth over the last four decades. Do you see what happened to the black line [below] which plots the net worth of the median American? That’s right … not much. For forty years, Americans’ median net worth hardly budged.

What’s fascinating about rich lists like the Forbes 400 is that their authors seem oblivious to what they’re measuring. While ostensibly celebrating ‘wealth’, these lists are actually a barometer for social inequality.

As it turns out, inequality is written everywhere in the Forbes data. When the rich get richer, it’s not just the Forbes 400 who pull away from everyone else. Within the Forbes 400, the stupendously rich pull away from the ultra rich, who pull away from the mega rich, who pull away from the considerably rich, and so on. At a certain point, we run out of adjectives to describe the hand of inequality.
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FULL ARTICLE -- https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/09/24/how-the-rich-get-richer/

#Capitalism #Inequality

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