Right. Wealth and power are concentrated and do not need to be coordinated. Their individual actions and self-interests organically merge to maintain the state of affairs that keeps them wealthy and in power.
It's a combination of that and the reality that wealth is power and power is relative.
Let's say you've got $100 million. You want to do whatever you want to do. It turns out what you want is to buy a certain beachfront property. Or perhaps curry the favor with a certain politician around a certain bill. Well, so do some folks with $200 million, and they can outbid you. So even though you have tons of money in absolute terms, when you are using your power in venues that happen to also be populated by other rich folks, you can still be relatively power-poor.
And all of those other rich folks know this is how the game works too, so they are all always scrambling to get to the top of the pile.
if a few people have most of the money, they have nearly all of the power because nobody else's share of power or money is greater than theirs, even collectively
honest question, do you have an ulterior motive in asking your question?
Let's take an extreme case: every person in the world has their wealth increased by 10% over what they have today, except for one person who has his wealth increased by $1 quadrillion.
Everybody is better off, right? Except that wealthy person is going to rule the world, and stack the deck to help himself, and there's nothing that says he's only going to do it in such a way that everybody else keeps increasing their wealth too, or even keeps their wealth at all.
We can see this at work in the US where the political process has become pretty corrupted, to the point that half the politicians act like wealthy people in the US suffer under a tremendously high tax burden when they actually pay less as a percentage than the average person, and the other half pays lip service to getting the wealthy to pay more but only proposes weak measures that never go anywhere, and where systematic lawbreaking in the financial sector that led to a gigantic financial crises went completely unpunished, except for the one guy who made the mistake of ripping off wealthy people.
> "388 individuals possessed as much household wealth as the lower half of the world's population combined"
My goodness! This completely shocked me. I wonder if we are all complicit in allowing this to happen. I know wealth buys power and vice versa, so it likely would be hard to change but aren't we all indirectly allowing this to happen?
Wealth gives a person power. The people who get very wealthy (in our current system) are not generally the people who will do the best things with power. This seems like a situation which could be improved on.
BS. People with the most money have the most power, make laws, and continually grow more powerful. Labor is extremely valuable, but suppressed by those with more money.
reply