alt Hacker News> Then the next question is why does wealth, in practically all industrious countries seem to distribute disproportionally and not uniformly?
Compound interest, and as (admittedly) an armchair economist I buy into the argument that goes along the lines of:
"when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth".
In my view, r has been greater than g for some time now.
> Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.
To me, it is clear that while Europe optimizes for quality of life to a large extent, Americans really drink the coo-laid and enthusiastically optimize for shareholder value. I highly encourage you to give life in Europe a go at some point. I hope you'll return (or stay) also having reached the same perspective.
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This isn't a view thing though. We have the data. What you're saying is what Piketty said.
Only issue is, when you account for depreciation, you find that r>g applied to housing (so boomer NIMBYs) not billionaires.
This is not a Karl Marx thing, but a Henry George thing.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-...
I'm not American. I did stay for months though in the US (SF, NY) and Europe (Italy, France, Greece, PT, DE, more) at times.
I think for competitive and talented people, US in general offers much more lucrative opportunities as long as you're OK with the US specific drawbacks. For non-competitive people, living in Europe would probably be a more convenient.
I think the problem though is in the future, both the US and Europe has grave societal and economic issues but from the different angles. Europe lacks economical drive and seems to discourage change on a cultural level. The US on the other hand seems to be an extreme catalyst.
I'm not familiar enough with quantitative data to judge on the compound interest, nevertheless I think in the last few decades we have already been witness on the global level to major changes in wealth: empires like UK have shrank, giants like China have risen. This had been very different a few decades ago and is an anecdote at least that compound interest can only do so much for empires, in the face of major changes.